ÖKOBAUDAT on the World Sustainable Built Environment Conference in Hong Kong

The Sustainable Built Environment (SBE) series began in 2000 and is now the pre-eminent international conference series on sustainable building and construction. The series operates on a three-year cycle with planning in year one, regional conferences in year two and a global conference in year three. Albeit strong competition, Hong Kong won the hosting right of the global conference in June 2017, which concluded the 2015-2017 conference cycle by embracing all the top findings from the 20 regional conferences held in 2016. Themed "Transforming Our Built Environment through Innovation and Integration: Putting Ideas into Action", the conference brought together 1,800 participants from 57 countries and regions. Over 100 sessions offered an inspirational opportunity to "Put Ideas into Action".

The team engaged in ÖKOBAUDAT was present on the conference with two lectures.

Dr. Tanja Brockmann reported on current measures taken within ÖKOBAUDAT structure and relevant tools as a basis for international networking („German ÖKOBAUDAT goes International – an online Infrastructure for LCA as a basis for International Structure“). As an important precondition, data can be entered bilingually and displayed in English or German, alternatively. The filtering functions of the database facilitate filtering by data type (generic, average, …). Within the frame of a demonstration project (ÖKOBAUDAT und Europa II, SWD - 10.08.17.7-16.42) the technical conditions were established to search several database nodes connected in a network and display the joint search results – a first step towards an international database network. These features are currently available in a beta version, the release is scheduled for August 2017.

Hildegund Figl presented the Working Group ‘International open Data Network for Sustainable Building’ (WG InData) in the presentation ‘International EPD data network – demonstration project for an open international online database structure’. Since the main objectives and principles of the WG InData have been specified (see Decalogue), the next steps are adopting the data format, formulating rules relating to the contents of data fields and data presentation, defining data quality requirements and verification processes as well as finding an agreement on a business model.