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In the latest installment of ARC's Smart Cities Podcast, we speak to John Petze of Project Haystack, which is an open smart city initiative aimed at providing common context to the vast amounts of data being generated by IoT enabled applications in the world of smart cities and buildings. You can read the more detailed blog post we did about Project Haystack here. This podcast is both a great summary of the industry issues that led up to the formation of Project Haystack, how the organization is providing common context to data, and how end-users and owner/operators can benefit. We have included the (lightly) edited transcript below. You can now subscribe to the ARC Smart Cities Podcast through Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, and Spotify.

Haystack 4 - The Continued Evolution of Semantic Tagging – What it Is and Why it Matters

Presenters: John Petze and Marc Petock

When: Tuesday, February 4, 2020 at 10:30 AM - 11:30 AM

Location: W311C

Presented by: automatedbuildings.com

Project Haystack is excited to announce the publication of the Haystack Connections Magazine Fall 2019 issue – the 6th edition of the magazine. It is a true testament to the collaboration that the Haystack Community is committed to and the accomplishments that have been made this past year and the ones anticipated as we head into 2020.

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 Wednesday, October 30, 2019 at 3:00 PM EDT.

Project Haystack

Stand G11

Project Haystack will be exhibiting at the Smart Buildings Show in London, October 9-10, 2019.

Smart Buildings Show 2019 promises to be bigger and better than ever, with more stands, conference presentations and visitors than ever before.

Attendance for the 2018 show was up 45 per cent with visitors coming from all over the UK and Europe. John Hatcher, conference director, commented, "We had a great exhibition and conference, with the theatres at full capacity for both days. There is clearly a thirst for knowledge in the smart buildings industry and we will be adding an additional theatre this year."

Claire Hatchett, Sales Manager said, "We have already booked more stands and space than last year. We anticipate selling all the available stands, so if you are thinking of exhibiting please contact me as soon as possible. Smart Buildings Show 2019 promises to be our biggest and best event yet.”

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.