Data Mesh as a backbone for European building logbooks

Every member state of the European Union wants to improve the energy efficiency of its buildings. Data plays a crucial role in this transformation. How can the European Union provide a common data platform that enables sharing and reusing this data, and makes creating new data-driven services easy. We developed a Data Mesh platform that makes all this possible.

About the client: Demo-BLog

This European project focuses on how Digital Buildings Logbooks can accelerate energy-efficient renovations. How can such a digital logbook bring together data and make it comprehensible? And how can we then use that data to make the right choices for our building stock?

Challenge: building-related data sources are fragmented across organizations

Improving a building’s energy efficiency involves making decisions. And to get those decisions right, you need data: heat demand, roof orientation, electricity consumption, etc.

But building-related data sources are often fragmented across various organizations, including government agencies, utility providers, and construction companies.

In the sector of building logbooks, there is a fragmented network of potential existing and new 'building-related' data sources. The extremely limited availability of information, combined with a lack of a common repository of data through a shared platform, directly leads to additional costs and inefficiencies in designing, constructing, operating, and financing buildings.

This is making it difficult for teams to share and reuse data effectively.

Solution: a Data Mesh approach

The Building Logbooks developed to date rely on point-to-point integrations towards individual data sources to collect data. It is then up to a central team to organise the data and make it available for the many data use cases and data sources. Moreover, each building logbook initiative in Europe has this same challenge which would result in multiple such teams.

Avoiding the typical bottlenecks?

“In an environment with so many different stakeholders, this way of working quickly reaches its limits and is not scalable. That one central team becomes the bottleneck”, says Tom De Wolf, Innovation Lead and Data Mesh Expert at ACA Group.

Provide flexibility and simplify exchange of data

Enforcing a common data interface protocol on all building logbooks or source systems is a common data exchange strategy. Research proved that it is not advisable due to the diverse nature of the current landscape, the effort it would take for each data owner, and the optimal protocol also depends on how the data is to be reused and consumed. It is better to enable stakeholders with a method of data exchange supporting multiple protocols and lowering their individual effort and complexity to do so.

"This calls for an open data platform through which data can be discovered, exchanged and integrated. For this particular project, Data Mesh proved to be the best possible choice.”

What are the four major advantages of Data Mesh for this European project?

Decentralised ownership: enabling a scalable data ecosystem by distributing the responsibility to share and reuse data.
Data as a product: makes data easily reusable for an infinite number of use cases.
Self-service data platform: lowers the cognitive load for teams to share and reuse data. Also lowers the total cost of ownership by providing a shared platform and easy to use self-service tooling to discover, share and consume data products.
Federated computational governance: governance by a team of representatives and experts with a focus on interoperability between data products.

The Data Mesh concept can bring diverse benefits to the DBL ecosystem. By providing a common data environment where the latest data is accessible, a Data Mesh for the DBL industry can enable more effective interactions between DBL stakeholders, which usually act in different domains, operate with different IT structures, and have different access rights.
— Jerson Amorocho, Researcher at Buildings Performance Institute Europe (BPIE)

Approach: one way of working, endless possibilities

We developed a Data Mesh platform proof of concept and demo on how data exchange and sharing can be facilitated in a new and innovative way.

We focused on building a self-service data platform as the key enabler, empowering data producers to create Data Products and take ownership of their data in a decentralized manner.

Tom De Wolf: “Data Mesh puts the ownership as close as possible with the experts of that data. Because they are best placed to manage that data as effectively as possible and make it available in a ready-to-use format. So that the data is available to the rest of the ecosystem.’”

“This makes it easier to share data as a product. Not: here's a data dump, figure it out yourself. But insightful data that others can use as a basis.”

Result: Data Mesh platform as a backbone

We demonstrated the feasibility and the potential of a Data Mesh platform to enable use cases such as providing actionable insights for policymakers at the European level, and advanced use cases around energy efficiency optimization.

This underscored the potential of Data Mesh as a backbone for collaborative ecosystems in the building sector to share and reuse data.

To prove this, we ourselves created a use case that visualises which neighbourhoods in Flanders are most suitable for shared energy grids.

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