The Woningpas (Building Passport for residential dwellings), an instrument developed in Flanders (Belgium), is a unique integral digital file of every house, accessible to the homeowner (light version launched December 2018 ) and his / her appointed representatives (medium version 2019). It is an instrument to provide the home-owner with an insight into all relevant building aspects of his home including energetic aspects (insulation & installation), renewables, the soil, the licensed works, the quality of the house and the evolution towards the  long-term s goal on energy performance and housing quality. The Woningpas is both a digital safe and a personalized guide for all past and future works. Woningpas gives access to data and certificates the government keeps in  databases. The content of the Woningpas is generated automatically through a series of links with existing thematic databases. A home-owner has free access to the passport of the house(s) he owns. After accessing the tool by means of his electronic ID, information on the residential real estate is collected and the existing relevant building and environmental data is reused and displayed  in the Woningpas. By making this information accessible in one central platform, the owner does not have to send or apply for any information to the various public authorities nor has he the need to consult information in different less user-friendly portals.

The ‘Woningpas/Building Passport’ aims  to realize a dynamic in the renovation market, but also offers the property-owners a tool that helps them in planning renovation and their relations with the government, including obtaining financial compensations and certificates in an efficient way.

 

The Woningpas/Building Passport was co-created and co-financed by3 ministers and 4 Flemish public authorities in various housing-related competences:  the Flemish Waste Agency (OVAM), the Department of Environment, Housing Flanders (W-V) and the Flemish Energy Agency (VEA). In addition, the Flanders Information Agency (AIV) is involved as the database administrator of the Building Register that generates a unique building entity access key that is used by the Woningpas tool to link all available information together for display in the Woningpas.

 

The development of the Woningpas/building Passport takes place in phases: the platform was launched in December 2018; new content and functionalities will be added in 2019 and more connections with other data-sources will be realized the upcoming years until 2023.

 

• The Woningpas actually provides the owner an insight into a series of relevant aspects of his house (data on energy, renewables, installations, soil and environment). If available, the Energy Performance Certificate including a detailed advice for deep renovation towards the 2050 goal is included. The tool gives a one-page overview of all inspections and attestations that are obligatory  when selling, renting or renovating a house and gives insight in what is already available on this concern. The tool is conceived with focus on user-centric-design so the visuals are easy to understand and personalized.

 

• Later in 2019 other housing aspects (water, housing quality, electricity, ...) will also be mapped. In addition, the owner will also be able to authorize other persons to consult the Woningpas (buyers, tenants, reporters, energy experts, architects.) The portal will also offer self-services enabling the owner and authorized representatives (residents, construction partners, ...) to  add all kinds of relevant building information in the passport.
   
• In the long term, the Woningpas will expand to non-residential buildings and thus evolve into a building pass.

 

Goal

By stimulating cooperation between various (governmental) organizations, the Woningpas aims to be an effective and reference instrument that leads to sustainable and high-quality renovation of the Flemish building park and streamlined communication about this and with users.

The goal for the further development of the Woningpas are:

 

Creating an integral platform

• The Woningpas contains a complete set of building and environment related data managed by various public authorities , including permits, energy performance, inspections, certificates, ....
  • The Woningpas will be enriched with data and functionalities relating to other building-related themes such as water, fire safety, accessibility, heritage, material performance, sustainability, burglary protection, ...;
  • In addition, the Woningpas will be enriched with information that exceeds the level of the plot, with themes such as mobility, heat networks, environmental planning, low-carbon energy options, etc.
• The Woningpas will expand to the entire building park. In that way, it becomes a real “building passport”, a unique platform for data visualization for all types of buildings.

Stimulating sustainable and energy-efficient renovations

• The  Woningpas is a catalyst for realizing a sustainable, high-quality and energy-efficient building park by 2050 by visualizing long term policy goals in a made-to-measure way so citizens can actively benchmark their housing situation.
• The Woningpas gives citizens insight into the possible actions to be taken for a sustainable renovation, the associated costs and energy savings and supports the citizen by providing insight into the administrative steps involved.

Creating a pro-active instrument

• The Woningpas is a proactive tailor-made platform that provides insight and reports on available grants , loans and benefits and ultimately will allow the citizen to automated apply for these measures  directly in the tool. .
• Via the Woningpas, citizens can consult, manage, add and share all building information in one central platform together with appointed third parties or persons.
• The Woningpas integrates smart information, real consumption data, digital meters, ... and plays a role in energy monitoring and maintenance of the house.

Value for the citizens

The Woningpas prevents fragmentation of information by bringing together all available certificates in one digital overview for the citizen. The platform provides access to data and certificates that the public authorities have at their disposal and offers the possibility to request (download) the certificates.

By making specific  information centrally accessible, the owner does not have to send this information separately to different parties. The portal contains services enabling t the owner and persons he authorizes (residents, construction partners, ...) can consult, download or add information in the Woningpas (digital safe).

Future buyers or tenants can, after obtaining permission from the owner, obtain a global view of the available information on the property they wish to purchase or rent. The Woningpas offers them direct, reliable, objective and uniformized information that makes the comparison   of several houses more effective.

Awareness of the citizen is increased, by informing them on current and future standards, obligations and objectives and giving him personal advice on an energy-efficient quality renovation

Share and reuse of data

By means of the digital Woningpas, a home-owner or authorized representative gains access and insight into relevant building, plot and environment-related information the public authorities dispose of. The Woningpas can be consulted after log-in on any personal computer, tablet or smartphone.

 

The content comes from certificates, inspections, permits, technical data, open data, ... that are available in various databases of the Flemish public authorities. The Woningpas makes it much easier for the owner to check, for example, to what extent the house is energy-efficient or meeting quality standards, or holds the necessary certificates, ... in one central platform.

 

Solution design and governance

The Woningpas tool is not a database , but it re-uses and links information that already exists in different databases.  It is created due to a successful collaboration between 5 entities of the Flemish Government: VEA, OVAM, Omgeving, Wonen-Vlaanderen, AIV under the authority of 3 ministers of 3 different political parties.

The architecture of the Woningpas is service-oriented: all individual sources provide access to their data via services so that they can be addressed by us as well as by other services if necessary. Access to most of the services passes through Magda, the Flemish data-integrator platform, that guards data-traffic between different entities of the Flemish or Belgian public authorities . Governance of the solution is made possible through the WebIDM platform of the Flemish administration.  Administrators (governmental employees) can autonomously assign roles (e.g. webmaster) to other individuals.

Woningpas is developed in Liferay DXP-technology as an open system, built with open standards. By means of portlets different kinds of information (on different building and environmental aspects) are shared with citizens. These portlet-architecture makes it possible to easily add new themes to the Woningpas, or generate  a personalized view to information to the citizen.

Impact/extent of reuse

In the near future, assembly-services are foreseen in the architecture of the Woningpas:  these services are used to share information in our platform, but can also be reused as a compilation-service to other entities and partners as well.

The architecture and basic principles of the Woningpas has led toa solution that can be reused for similar initiatives outside Flanders. The idea has already been pitched to other regions in the Belgian political landscape and on international exchange for a. Several other member states are planning to develop their own building passport. . As a partner in the Horizon 2020 project iBRoad, the Flemish Energy Agency shares experiences and expertise to facilitate other partners to develop similar tools.

Woningpas has a generic intermediate service layer that translates raw information from data sources to interpreted information that is understandable by citizens. These assembly-services, as part of   the architecture of the Woningpas, are used to share information in the  platform, but can also be reused as a compilation-service to other entities and partners as well. Other future clients or partners  can thus plug in to this intermediate layer as well. This is already happening with Burgerprofiel, another initiative of the Flemish Government – a unique portal for person related  information, that extracts a summarized overview of housing related data in this service layer of the Woningpas .

Sustainability

The flexible intermediate service layer can easily be extended to quickly unlock additional data sources. The complete environment has a high available capacity, which is partly running in Amazon's Cloud and partly on-premise (for sensitive civilian information).

This tool, with record for over 3 million dwellings, plays a central role in the regional renovations strategy 2050. Next to the services for the building owner, the tools offers functionalities for monitoring the evolution of the building stock towards the 2050 goals. Given this position of the tool, a long life is guaranteed.

Innovation

The tools has a complete asynchronous setup: widgets that show information inside Woningpas are loaded in parallel and only show information once it is available. For this purpose, reactive frameworks are used both on the front-end and the back-end.

Docker swarm cluster: all services run in containers that can maintain themselves and recover/reboot in case of a problem.

A feedback module can show FAQ’s contextually to the page the civilian is visiting at the moment.

Complete module for secured sharing your housing information with another civilian or 3rd party, such as an estate agent, an architect,….

Personalized data and services

The Woningpas is available for free for all Flemish house owners. Sign in is possible via eID or newer, more simple authentication mechanisms such as Itsme.

Data is personalized up to the individual level. The power is in the comparison with statistical data that are relevant for the user (e.g. comparison to similar houses in my city, province or Flanders Region as a whole).

The setup is completely GDPR proof: personal data is only kept volatile in the platform (in cache or in session) and never stored persistently. Access to personal data is thoroughly audited and can easily be queried in case of a privacy breach.

User-centric: via citizen participation from concept to implementation

Woningpas - three ministers and five agencies. Our first challenge was to get all the noses in the same direction and to shape  the concept of the Woningpas. In a co-creation process (user experience design), using service design techniques, the actual needs of the end user, the citizen, were tested with the vision of all stakeholders. With this Service Design process, we were able to determine which customer needs 'the product' should serve by priority, how the customer experience can be organized to achieve a high level of satisfaction and how citizens are encouraged to actually invest in sustainable living.

 

After this first phase it was time to translate the insights from the user research and the co-creation workshops into a visual concept of what the Woningpas should be (prototypes see: http://woningpas.brandplatform.be/design.html.) This prototype was checked at regular intervals with the cooperating entities, stakeholders and citizens on the basis of consultations, co-creation sessions, citizen surveys, guerrilla testing and in-depth interviews with citizens. After many iterations, each time thoroughly coordinated with end users and stakeholders, the Woningpas was built by A.C.A IT-solutions.

 

For the next version of the Woningpas (2019), an analogue design trajectory has been running since months to meet the needs of sharing and enriching the content of the Woningpas and to continuously follow up the acceptance of the first product.