Deriving and Benchmarking Building Renovation Passport Data Requirements Against CityGML and the Energy ADE
Keywords: Building Renovation Passport, Digital Building Logbook, CityGML, Energy ADE, Data interoperability, Semantic mapping, Building stock, Open data
Abstract. Reaching the European Union’s 2050 climate targets depends on renovating a building stock responsible for a large share of the EU’s energy use and greenhouse-gas emissions. The recast Energy Performance of Buildings Directive (EU/2024/1275) proposes two instruments: the Digital Building Logbook (DBL), a repository for building data across the whole life cycle, and the Building Renovation Passport (BRP), a stepwise renovation roadmap that draws on those data. Both require a data model to make building data machine-readable and interoperable, yet few European initiatives provide one: most publish semi-structured spreadsheets, software templates, or closed schemas, so their coverage cannot be assessed and each new implementation starts from scratch.
This paper tests whether an open, formally specified geospatial data model can cover the data needs of a BRP, based on CityGML 2.0 paired with the Energy Application Domain Extension 3.0. From a comparative analysis of 14 heterogeneous European initiatives, we synthesise a so-called Minimum Set of Required Data (MSRD) of 275 attributes, benchmark it field by field against the candidate schema, and test the mapping at two scales on Dutch building-stock data. CityGML 2.0 with Energy ADE 3.0 already covers roughly 95% of the MSRD. The few missing fields are specific and isolated, most concentrated in the renovation-advice module. These findings indicate that CityGML and the Energy ADE already meet most BRP data needs, with the remaining gaps addressable through targeted improvements in further developments of the Energy ADE.
