Today’s systems, equipment, smart devices and IoT applications are generating tremendous amounts of data. However, the data can be very hard to organize, integrate and use across different applications for a number of reasons including inconsistent naming conventions and different terminologies, the many different formats and the limited data descriptors. In essence, it lacks information to describe the meaning of the data, and without meaning, a time-consuming manual effort is required before value creation can begin.

Project-Haystack is an open source collaborative initiative that is making it easier to unlock value from the vast quantity of data being generated by smart devices, smart equipment and smart systems with a simple, flexible meta data tagging methodology. The work developed by the Project-Haystack community provides an easy to use approach to describe the meaning of device data, consensus approved taxonomies and tagging conventions and open source implementations to streamline adoption in enterprise applications and devices.

Founded in 2011, Project-Haystack has achieved widespread adoption. The organization  is pleased to announce the inaugural issue of Project-Haystack Connections, an E-Zine presenting information, case studies and articles on the use of Haystack tagging.