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Project Haystack’s webinar, “Haystack 5 and Xeto for Python Developers,” led by Rick Jennings (SkyFoundry) and Scott Muench (J2 Innovations), delivered a fast, focused walkthrough of Haystack 5’s major new capabilities—especially how to use them hands-on in Python.

The webinar emphasized the critical role of metadata validation in achieving true interoperability in smart buildings. We introduced Xeto, a new open-source tool and specification repository, as the foundation for Haystack 5’s next-generation capabilities.

View the webinar at: https://bit.ly/46Ao0CO

You will learn:

1. Validation Unlocks Interoperability

• Applying tags isn’t enough—validation ensures metadata is complete, accurate, and aligned with application needs.
• This enables reuse of metadata, reduces onboarding costs, and supports cross-application compatibility.
• Provides all stakeholders confidence. Confidence that work is done to specs. Confidence that apps will work as intended. Confidence that AI models will yield valid results.

2. Xeto: The Validation Engine

Xeto is a command-line and web-based tool that:

• Defines metadata specs
• Validates metadata against those specs.
• Supports translation between ontologies (e.g., Haystack → Brick).
• It’s central to Haystack 5’s early-stage commercialization and open ecosystem.

3. DOE BENEFIT Program

Project Haystack received U.S. Department of Energy BENEFIT funding to:

• Lower energy costs.
• Improve building digitization.
• Support workforce development.
• The project spanned three years, focusing on tool development, validation, and field deployment.

4. Open, Collaborative Ecosystem

Haystack’s success is driven by contributions from:

• OEMs, integrators, consultants, and application developers.
• The Xeto.dev repository allows all stakeholders to contribute, validate, and consume metadata specs.

5. Tangible ROI for All Stakeholders

• Building Owners: Lower costs, better data quality, futureproofing.
• System Integrators: Faster deployment, reusable specs, less manual work.
• Manufacturers: Interoperability, reduced support costs.
• Application Providers/Data Scientists: Structured data, better AI models, faster time to value. 

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The place for the Project Haystack community to network, share, create synergy, and generate business opportunities.

Haystack Connect 2025—organized and produced by the Project Haystack Organization—provides a unique, open-forum for professionals involved in automation, control and the Internet of Things to learn and share the latest technologies and techniques for connecting systems and utilizing device data in applications including intelligent buildings, energy management, remote monitoring, and other IoT devices and applications.

The two-and-a-half-day long conference includes keynote presentations, a vendor exhibition hall, and a packed schedule of technical sessions covering data acquisition, communications, protocol translation, data visualization, analytics, data semantics, modeling and security—all critical technologies essential to using operational data to drive improved performance.

CxEnergy 2024
April 29 - May 2, 2024 
San Diego, California

Project Haystack is proud to be among the Supporting Organizations for this year's CxEnergy 2024 Commissioning, Energy Management & Building Technology Conference & Expo April 29-May 2 in San Diego, CA.

As per our agreement with CxEnergy, all Project Haystack Member receive a 10% discount on the registration fee with promo code SUPPORTING10. We encourage you to share this promo code with other members on social media, on calendar events, and in newsletters.

Project Haystack also receives ONE complimentary registration to CxEnergy with promo code SUPPORTING. So, this is first come, first serve!!! Note that additional registration is required for pre-conference CxA Workshop, EMP Seminar, TAB & Cx Seminar, or Golf Tournament.

More details available by clicking here.

Richmond, VA – November 14, 2023 – The Project Haystack Organization (www.project-haystack.org), a collaborative community addressing the challenge of utilizing semantic modeling and tagging to streamline the interchange of data among different systems, devices, equipment and software applications, today announced the publication of the 12th issue of their Connections Magazine.

One of the resources available from the Project Haystack website is a spreadsheet that documents a State of Utah job from a few years ago. This spreadsheet details the various types of equips and how they should be tagged. It also lists all the points in each equip type and documents the proper Haystack tags used.  This is a great resource for anyone who is new to Haystack and trying to build their first Haystack compatible BAS database.

When Haystack 4 was released, some previously defined tags were changed or deprecated. The downloadable spreadsheet has now been updated to reflect the tag changes made in Haystack 4.  If you are a Project Haystack novice and looking for help tagging a new project, you can use this file to see how to tag entities correctly.