Blog

The 4^th biennial Haystack Connect conference, was another great success demonstrating the continued growth of the community and widespread adoption of the Haystack standard by manufacturers, developers and systems integrators large and small. Attended by Project Haystack community members and representatives from the smart building and IoT industry, 24 sponsors and exhibitors from around the world, the community forged ahead once again, addressing the evolving challenges of making data easier to use and interoperable across the built and IoT environments.

The event featured over 50 speakers from systems integrators, technology providers, OEMs, and building owners and operators to presentations focused on the technical side of Project Haystack and the Working Groups, and the public review of the new Haystack 4!

Haystack 4 - A Brief Introduction

The understanding of the need for semantic modeling of device and equipment data has matured significantly in the last decade and the requirements and techniques for applying semantic modeling to equipment data are advancing rapidly. As we have learned, semantic modeling is critical for humans to work with and understand the ever-increasing amount of data coming from their systems, but the process of manually applying that semantic model is not scalable. We need our tools to simplify and automate how the semantic model is applied.

Haystack 4 builds on the 8 years of experience in applying Haystack across thousands of buildings worldwide, the input from practitioners in the community throughout that time, as well the collaborators that have participated in the activities of Haystack Working Group 551 over the past year. The way you configure tags today using Haystack will not change, but as you will see, the way the tags get modeled within Haystack systems will enable the tools you use to become smarter so you spend less time manually configuring tags and more time getting value out of the raw data coming from your IoT devices.

Extensive documentation will be available on this work and it will be a key focus of the Haystack Connect 2019 event, with a full day track dedicated to a detailed review of Haystack 4. Our goal with this document is to offer a high-level preview of the major advances that Haystack 4 brings to the challenge of semantic modelling of the devices and equipment systems that permeate the built environment.

ControlTalk NOW: CTN 305 interview is with DLR Group Principal, Ruairi Barnwell. DLR Group is one of the most advanced integrated design firms in the world and recent recipient of the ControlTrends Awards 2018 Project Haystack Award.

Project Haystack is exhibiting at the ISH 2019 Conference at Messe Frankfurt in Frankfurt, Germany next month March 11 - 15, 2019 in Hall 10.3, Stand A61. The conference website is ish.messefrankfurt.com!

ISH is the world’s leading trade fair focusing on the responsible management of water and energy in buildings. It sets trends for modern bathroom design, sustainable heating and air-conditioning technology as well as intelligent home systems.

Today we announced that we presented DLR Group the Project Haystack Award for their support of the Project Haystack open-source project and adoption of the methodology as an end user, in front of a packed house at the 2018 ControlTrends Awards ceremony held January 13th in Atlanta during AHR Expo 2019.

DLR Group is an integrated design firm with 30 offices around the globe and over 1,200 professionals delivering architecture, engineering, interiors, planning, and building optimization for new construction, renovation, and adaptive reuse projects. One of the world’s leading sustainable design firms, DLR Group’s promise is to elevate the human experience through design. This promise inspires sustainable design for a diverse group of public and private sector clients, local communities, and our planet. DLR Group is 100 percent employee-owned and was an early adopter of the Architecture 2030 Challenge, an initial signatory to the AIA 2030 Commitment and the China Accord.

“In the past year we have seen a significant increase in world-wide adoption of the Project Haystack methodology in the building industry, and expanding into smart devices for homes, industrial facilities, factories and agriculture,” said John Petze, Executive Director of the Project Haystack Organization. “We’re pleased to recognize DLR Group’s use of the Haystack methodology of semantic modeling and tagging, implemented through their Building Optimization and High-Performance Design practices.”

Project Haystack is excited to announce the publication of the Haystack Connections Magazine Winter 2019 issue – the 5th edition of the magazine. Haystack Connections reports the news from the Haystack community and provides updates on adoption of the Haystack standard by consultants, end users, manufacturers and software developers, and presents stories demonstrating the success of the community as we work together to make device data easier to use across applications of all types.

An official press announcement will be released on Tuesday, January 15, 2019 at 8:00 AM EST.

The theme of this issue of our Connections Magazine is ‘Enabling the Data Revolution in the Built Environment’. Given the number of projects, events and work in progress by the Haystack community around the world, this seemed an appropriate theme for this issue.