Abstract
The European Union regulations point out how from 2020 all new buildings should have “zero” energy consumption. To promote this new generation of buildings, the web platform European Climate and Cultural Atlas for Plus Energy Building (PEB) Design (2CAP-Energy Atlas) has been developed.
The 2CAP-Energy Atlas (https://cssprocapi01.eurac.edu/ce_atlas/) is a comprehensive open-source tool that allows users to focus the development efforts on appropriate technologies to construct PEB. This is achieved through context analysis based upon local climate factors, cultural factors associated with building occupants, experience, and insights from PEB designers’ interviews from 4 different European zones.
The Atlas is conceptualized with the scope of driving designers, researchers, and policy makers to new levels of knowledge in PEB; where the current experience is aimed at being captured and improved.
The tool has been built using the EURAC’s Environmental Data Platform (EDP) for sharing geospatial data and map. The EDP provides the environment to organize data, maps and metadata following the FAIR principles. This means that all the collected data are findable in a metadata catalogue, Accessible by Web Map Service (WMS), interoperable with external clients and Reusable thanks to open licenses.
The Atlas collected 25 layers, presented in 18 maps: the main map, plus 17 analytical maps for a deeper analysis. All datasets are accessible from the Atlas website or by other clients (desktop-GIS or other web portal) using webservices provided by the EDP.
Data, metadata, and analysis are fully open, downloadable, and accessible by anyone using tables, graphs, texts and map layers.
Datasets have different sources, such as:
1. data from Eurostat platform
2. results of literature review on energy demand, everyday practices, demographics, social norms and material conditions referring to different territories and climate areas
3. cultural analysis on different European countries made inside the Cultural-E project
4. existing PEB monitoring data (real information from inhabited buildings, R&D experimental buildings/demo sites, etc.)
5. real data/information from 4 PEBs that are going to be built during the Cultural-E project
6. result of analysis performed by dedicated software for designers.
The Atlas has been built with the idea of being constantly updated by the building science community. Anyone can contribute to improving the Atlas in different ways:
- Uploading new layers in the EDP generating a new map for the Atlas.
- Sending data/text/other using a dedicated form. in this case the conformity of the data with the project purpose is checked by the Atlas administrator.
- Creating some additional analysis with the available data, adding value to the existing work.
The tool enables the contamination of knowledge in the construction of PEB buildings between different nations and sectors.