Close to 300 engineers and developers, system integrators, service firms and forward-looking corporate end users came together at Tampa’s Saddlebrook Resort May 8-10 to further advance techniques for managing, presenting and analyzing the vast amounts of data generated by today’s IoT devices, smart equipment, and systems.

One of the key challenges brought on by the IoT and the growth in smart connected devices is making it easy to work with the data they produce and making this data interoperable. Core to this challenge is the fact that device data are stored and communicated in many different formats, have inconsistent, non-standard naming conventions, and provide very limited descriptors to enable us to understand its meaning. Simply put, the operational data from smart devices and equipment systems lacks information to describe its own meaning. Without meaning, a time-consuming manual effort is required before that data can be used effectively to generate value. The result is that the data from today’s devices, while technically “available,” is hard to use, thus limiting the ability for building operators to benefit fully from the value contained in the data. The open-source Project-Haystack.org community has been providing solutions to this challenge since its inception in 2011.

From the conference opening remarks made by Project Haystack’s Executive Secretary Marc Petock where he spoke about the importance of data and how it has changed the way companies in every industry does business and manages performance and how it is an irreplaceable asset, to John Petze, Project Haystack Executive Director discussing how the Haystack community has gone from “curious in 2013 to a very active adoption and acceptance phase now” the conference’s goal for the better use data to deliver value and the theme of Making Data Real, was present throughout the three days.

While there were many notable things that took place, one of the most notable was the dramatic advances and the sophistication of the work that is being delivered and deployed today. The technical presentations, from around the world, demonstrated that the members of the Haystack community are clearly on the leading edge of applying data science to the Building IoT.

It was clear from the attendance levels, the number of sponsors, exhibitors, presentations and energy at the event that the metadata challenge is now well understood and being addressed as part of a data management strategy. The Project Haystack standard is solving the challenge and is widely adopted and accepted, now appearing in specifications and requirements from end users that want to ensure they can take advantage of the value contained in their device data and make it actionable.

[an error occurred while processing this directive]Project Haystack has truly come of age.

If you would like to learn more about what took place at the conference, check out the following links:

Here is an excellent article written by Harbor Research presenting an independent view of Project Haystack and the Haystack Connect event:

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/data-freedom-smart-buildings-beyond-takeaways-from-haystack-adam-hise?trk=v-feed&lipi=urn%3Ali%3Apage%3Ad_flagship3_profile_view_base_recent_activity_details_shares%3By2LNXrUYeQZuShMVjyQ3fg%3D%3D

Here are some videos of the event:
https://youtu.be/YpUkZPXqFwI

https://youtu.be/5mOEXEYujO4

https://vimeo.com/217210655

All of the presentations from Haystack Connect 2017 are now online. Check out the Project Haystack discussion forum for details: http://project-haystack.org/forum/topic/490