May 2017, A Milestone for Project Haystack The Project-Haystack effort is driven by open-source, community-based effort with members from around the world.

Marc Petock Chief Communications Officer & Vice President, Marketing, Lynxspring and Connexx Energy, Inc. Executive Secretary, Project Haystack Contributing Editor

Next month I’m sure there are many milestones that will be occurring. In the world of data and streamlining the interchange and interoperability of data among IoT devices, smart equipment, and systems, the 3rd Haystack Connect 2017 conference kicks off May 8th through 10th at the Saddlebrook Resort in Tampa. This marks a milestone for the Project Haystack community and everyone who sees the value making the data from smart devices and systems actionable. The biennial event, produced by Project-Haystack.org, further advances the state-of-the-art in managing, presenting and analyzing the vast amounts of data generated by today’s IoT devices, smart equipment, and systems.

By now many of the readers may have heard the name Project Haystack but may still not be aware of what the open source community is doing to help our industry. Project Haystack has created a “markup language” for device data. The techniques and standards they have developed allow you to add uniform data descriptors to your data, no matter what their original names may have been. You don’t have to disturb or change your end system – the tags that describe the meaning of your data can be added at their entry point to higher level applications. Quite simply Project-Haystack makes data self-describing – to people and software applications. Once your data is tagged, software applications can automatically interpret, consume, analyze and present data because they can interpret its meaning.

The Project-Haystack effort is driven by open-source, community-based effort with members from around the world. It provides a data-tagging methodology that can be used in a wide variety of systems and applications, standardized tagging libraries for a wide range of equipment models and reference implementations in the most common programming languages to make it easy for developers to add Haystack support to their products and applications.

One milestone is that this year’s Haystack Connect 2017 marks the 3rd conference – the event began in 2013.

This year also marks the first time in conference history whereby we received an overwhelming amount of presentations and could not accommodate them all; thus showing the growing global acceptance and support of Project Haystack. This year’s conference presentations and technical programs get down to the real issues of connecting smart devices and their data to drive and deliver real solutions and include sessions on security, software tools, the latest in Project Haystack Technology, real world deployments  and more.

[an error occurred while processing this directive]In addition, there are a record number of exhibitors and sponsors supporting the event.

And speaking of support and acceptance, the community of Project Haystack supporters is now at its highest level ever and includes engineers, developers and executives from leading technology suppliers, system integrators and service firms and forward-looking corporate end users from around the world. Most recently, Intel joined the Project-Haystack board of directors signaling their support for the initiative – another key milestone.

Haystack Connect 2017 remains the only conference of its kind; a conference driven by a community brought together by the importance of the interchange and interoperability of data. If you are utilizing data today or looking at how you can get more from your existing data initiatives to reduce operating costs, drive better performance (both operationally and financially), maximize conservation of energy and create better occupant experiences from a “real” perspective, then attend Haystack Connect 2017.

More information about the Haystack Connect 2017 Conference is available at: http://www.haystackconnect.org

Conference Registration for Haystack Connect 2017 can be completed online at: http://www.haystackconnect.org/register

To learn more about the Project Haystack Organization, visit: http://www.project-haystack.org