The Building Renovation Passport from a Data Perspective

The Building Renovation Passport from a Data Perspective

Bottom line

The Building Renovation Passport literature has converged on what a passport should contain and diverged on how that content should be represented. At least six distinct data models or attribute sets have been proposed for the passport and its companion Digital Building Logbook since twenty eighteen, and when two of them are compared element-by-element the semantic overlap is low: Karami et al. report "very low similarity" between current Digital Building Logbook and Digital Building Passport models and find metadata largely absent, concluding that automated comparison fails because identical terms rarely exist across models. This is the central finding for a data-focused decision. The Building Renovation Passport's conceptual layer is mature enough to build on, its semantic layer is not standardized, and its empirical bottleneck is upstream of both: the data needed to populate a passport for an individual building is incomplete, of contested accuracy, and unevenly digitalized across Member States.

For a project defining Building Renovation Passport data requirements, the evidence supports proceeding, but the defensible scope is narrower than the literature's ambition. Building another conceptual attribute list would add to a crowded and unvalidated field; specifying requirements against verified national data availability, with explicit provenance, quality and update semantics per field, addresses the gap that every reviewed data model leaves open. Governance, meaning who owns, updates and is liable for passport data, is the thinnest evidence base of the four data dimensions examined, and is the area where a decision made now rests most heavily on assumption.

Evidence base and how it was assembled

This review works from the RENODAT state-of-the-art workbook and extends it with an independent sweep of OpenAlex across the four data dimensions, plus one step backward and forward on the citation graph from five anchor papers. Fifty-nine records not present in the workbook were added, principally on Building Energy Certificate data quality, semantic and ontology work, urban building energy modeling from registry data, material-passport data requirements, and twenty twenty-five to twenty twenty-six Digital Building Logbook publications. Every DOI in the workbook resolved against CrossRef and none carried a retraction flag. The combined, screened corpus is provided as a table alongside this review.