Project Haystack (http://www.project-haystack.org), a non-profit, 501(c) organization focused on developing common standards to streamline the interchange of data among today’s smart devices, systems and equipment, is pleased to announce that the 3rd biennial Haystack Connect 2017 Conference held at the Saddlebrook Resort near Tampa, Florida from May 8 – 10, 2017 was a great success. The conference offered over 30 Technical Sessions, intimate networking opportunities including a Vendor Showcase of exhibitors, live demonstrations, numerous keynote speakers and panelists, and a working meeting of the Project Haystack Organization. This year’s conference brought together over 300 industry leaders, end-users and corporate representatives involved in automation, control and Internet of Things applications from 14 countries, to share the latest techniques for managing, presenting and analyzing the vast amount of data generated by today’s smart devices and equipment systems in applications including intelligent buildings, energy, HVAC, lighting, remote monitoring, and other smart-device applications.

“One of the most notable things about the Haystack Connect 2017 Conference, was the dramatic advances in the sophistication of the work the Project Haystack community is doing. The presentations by community members from around the world demonstrated that they are clearly on the leading-edge of applying data science to the Building IoT,” said John Petze, Executive Director of the Project Haystack Organization. “The Technical sessions conducted by industry experts got down to the real issues of connecting smart devices and their data and to deliver real solutions to owners and operators.”

“A major focus throughout the Technical Sessions at Haystack Connect 2017, was the importance of interoperability and how the Project Haystack data tagging methodologies are contributing to making data, and therefore true device and systems interoperability a reality,” added Marc Petock, Executive Secretary of Project Haystack. “Bringing disparate data from many sources into one interoperable environment is the key to improved systems and equipment performance.”

Adam Hise, a Senior Associate at Harbor Research, attended the Haystack Connect Conference and added, "It was clear to see how Project Haystack is creating the foundation for the formation of multi-vendor ecosystems, in which flexible and tailored offerings can be delivered to end users at far lower cost than the aggregated services traditionally delivered by building automation vendors.  Incumbents who fail to adapt to industry coordination around open metadata frameworks like the Project Haystack methodology are painting themselves into a shrinking corner of the market."

Milan Milenkovic, Principal and Founder of IoTsense was one of the Keynote Speakers whose presentation was titled “IoT Semantic Interoperability and Project Haystack: Beginning of a Beautiful Friendship” said, “It was encouraging to hear all the new initiatives to extend the Project Haystack data-model design approach to other IoT verticals, bringing true semantic data interoperability in collaboration with other standards bodies such as BACnet, Sedona and EdgeX Foundry.”

The Haystack Connect Conferences are held biennially and are produced by the Project Haystack Organization, a 501(c) non-profit industry association. The corporate members and supporting companies are working to advance the use of a standardized approach to semantic tagging to describe the meaning of smart device data. This allows software applications to automatically consume, interpret, analyze and present data from smart devices, smart equipment and systems for IoT.

[an error occurred while processing this directive]The community-developed supporting materials include detailed documentation describing data modeling techniques, significant libraries of equipment models, and software reference implementations allowing software applications to easily consume smart device data that is marked up with the “Haystack Tags”. All work produced by the Project Haystack corporate membership is made available as open source.

At the end of the Conference, during the Gala Closing Dinner, the enthusiasm expressed regarding attending Haystack Connect 2019 was very apparent.

More information about the Project Haystack Organization is available at: http://www.project-haystack.org. Corporate Memberships are available. For information about membership, visit: http://www.project-haystack.org/about.

Information about the Haystack Connect 2017 Conference along with all presentations is available at: http://www.haystackconnect.org and @haystackconnect.

About Project Haystack
Since its formation in March of 2011, the Project Haystack Organization, a 501(c) non-profit trade association, has been providing the industry with an open-source, collaborative environment to address the challenge of making data self-describing using semantic modeling, also known as data tagging. The work developed by the Project Haystack member companies and community streamlines the process of managing, presenting and analyzing the vast amount of data produced by smart devices and equipment systems. The Haystack methodology can be used with virtually any type of system and device data and is not tied to any vendor or communication protocol. More information about Project Haystack is available at: http://www.project-haystack.org.