Interview: meet ReCheck Green Box project!

ReCheck Green Box found in ONTOCHAIN the underlying infrastructure for deploying and developing their solution: a solution that helps real estate investors, owners, or tenants to improve their building performance and sustainability, optimise their operational costs, reporting and compliance.

Learn in this interview with team member Emil Stoyanov more details about the work they are developing and their contribution to the ONTOCHAIN ecosystem.

Can you briefly present us your team?

The mission of ReCheck is to leverage blockchain as a power for good. The company was co-founded by Emil Stoyanov (CTO) and Emiliyan Enev (CEO) in 2017. We were fascinated by the capabilities of decentralised technologies to protect the authenticity of physical objects and digital content. We see blockchain as an infrastructure and enabler for fair, transparent and sovereign interactions. Our first solutions helped businesses create digital identities (tokens) of physical objects as a prerequisite for managing ownership, tracing and engaging their customers. We participated in the first hackathon for anti-counterfeiting organised by EUIPO and the European Commission and won the biggest blockchain hackathon in Europe - Odyssey Momentum. The latter was a pivotal moment in our company since the challenge was about opening up the real estate via ensuring secure and interoperable building data management. After Odyssey, we implemented a pilot project for the Dutch government (renovation passport of buildings) and developed tools for registering and verifying real estate data about retrofitting via decentralised technologies. This inspired us to pursue further development of infrastructure components that ensure trusted history of buildings on the blockchain.

In simple words, what is your project about and how does it contribute to the ONTOCHAIN software ecosystem?

ReCheck Green Box aims to open new ways of aggregating, securing and tracing data about buildings and making it available through open, standardised access interfaces - for short, “A Digital Building Logbook”. Our solution helps real estate investors, owners, or tenants to improve their building performance and sustainability, optimise their operational costs, reporting and compliance by providing the following functionalities:

• Blockchain-protected aggregation of real-time data from smart meters and sensors.
• Digital twinning - aggregation of documents related to the design and operation of the building.
• Semantic data processing and accessibility.
   

The implementation of Green Box with ONTOCHAIN will contribute to the overall ecosystem goals and objectives in several ways: Ontology utilisation and extensions. The current set of ontologies that form the foundation of the architecture will be used practically and eventually will indicate a need for extension through observing the data normalisation process and collecting feedback from pilots.

 Furthermore, the logbook we build will facilitate synergy and data exchange between applications – the open nature of Green Box will make it possible for other applications to both push data and retrieve data securely and transparently.  At the end of the project, Green Box will consume and exploit services and building blocks of the ONTOCHAIN architecture with real customers and real data.

Through ONTOCHAIN, Green Box will become an open hub for Building Log access and verification. The access will be made available to all existing applications from Call 1, Call 2, and Call 3 through documented APIs. The data that is available in the solution can be made on a per-request basis by the owners of the data, thus opening new frontiers for how this data can be consumed or even monetized.

How did you come up with this project idea and what benefits will it bring to the end users?

The data landscape in the real estate sector needs to be fixed - data is fragmented, insecure, outdated, or just missing. The complexity exponentially grows with so many stakeholders interacting, sharing information, and implementing processes. At the same time, there is a significant push for sustainable properties managed efficiently and maintained with low operational costs. We need a new approach, which inspired us to come up with the concept of the digital logbook.

A main driver for the development of Green Box has always been the need for transparent building maintenance and improvement. This is especially urgent and important in the context of the new energy efficiency standards and the higher requirements on the social level regarding air quality and well-being parameters. These aspects will determine how a (commercial) building is perceived and will strongly impact its value.

Our vision is to position the digital logbook as a standard for creating a single source of truth for the buildings. This will only be possible with the immutability environment provided by decentralised technologies and the possibility to verify records independently and reliably. Trustworthy data about the sustainability performance of real estate assets in the Green Box will drive their value and will determine the prices.

Moreover, ReCheck Green Box will provide unique benefits to its users, such as:

• Own and control the entire building data (real-time/historical) at their disposal whenever needed. This way, they don`t need to ask permission and pay third parties (various property data providers and platforms) to access their building information.
• Easily share reliable and well-structured data with stakeholders (maintenance mechanics, banks, public institutions, perhaps also neighbours, etc.). Improved accessibility is essential for efficient maintenance, profitable real estate transactions and sustainability reporting.
• Reduce the effort and costs when analysing and making data-driven decisions about optimising operational costs, reducing utility bills, and boosting well-being.
• Get a market premium when they transfer the logbook to the new owners of the properties.

In what way is ONTOCHAIN contributing to your own ambitions?

Blockchain is a team sport and ONTOCHAIN is the ecosystem that enables efficient collaboration between the builders in the domain. We see the biggest value of ONTOCHAIN in the field of composability. Our ambition is to assemble the building logbook by integrating interoperable software components that complement the solution. Furthermore, we see in ONTOCHAIN's blockchain the underlying infrastructure for deploying and developing the ReCheck Green Box. All corporate partners and launching customers of the logbook will become indirect users of the ONTOCHAIN's protocol. The financial support under ONTOCHAIN is also essential and allows us to focus on building key infrastructure components without the pressure of seeking immediate commercialisation.

How do you assess the experience of working with other ONTOCHAIN teams? What type of synergies do you want to explore/are already exploring?

 At this stage, ReCheck is exploring the integration of OriginTrail's knowledge graph and its tools for securing data on the blockchain. Also, we have identified GIMLY's SDK for self-sovereign identity as a preferable choice for ensuring data accessibility via decentralised identities. Our strategy is to pursue network effects and synergies with all current and future members of the ONTOCHAIN with whom we are mutually compatible.

So far, we have had an outstanding experience working with other teams within the ONTOCHAIN ecosystem. We appreciate the opportunity to explore different points of view on how technology can be used to solve problems or needs. These collaborations generate added value and improve our platform. Respectively our project will inspire and develop various benefits for the Real estate industry and complement and enhance more ONTOCHAIN projects by integrating our services. 

What are your expectations regarding the ONTOCHAIN software ecosystem and its contribution to the NGI priority areas?

We see the ONTOCHAIN software ecosystem as the community of the builders of the new decentralised digital infrastructure. We need new building blocks and software components to transition to a fairer, more transparent, and more secure online environment. ONTOCHAIN is a major catalyst in this process, bringing together the teams that lay the foundation for Next Generation Internet. The unique mission is to add a semantic layer to enormous information streams so that users can easily understand the meaning of data, use it efficiently and manage it confidently. ONTOCHAIN will provide the guidelines, tools, and, gradually, the standards for structuring, categorisation, and describing the data sets that impact our lives. The Next Generation Internet makes social and economic transactions more secure, and the ONTOCHAIN brings the tools for ensuring these same transactions are seamless and meaningful.