Richmond, VA – May 13, 2025 – The Project Haystack Organization (www.project-haystack.org), a 501(c) non-profit focused on advancing data modeling and interoperability for IoT devices, smart equipment, and building systems, announced several groundbreaking developments at its biennial conference, Haystack Connect 2025, held May 6–8.
The 2025 event served as a major milestone for the global Haystack community, bringing together leaders in building automation, smart infrastructure, energy management, and IoT. At the heart of the announcements was the announcement of Haystack 5, featuring the debut of Xeto, a powerful next-generation schema language, and support for RDF (Resource Description Framework) exports.
Haystack 5 and Xeto: Advancing Beyond Tagging
With Haystack 5, Project Haystack moves beyond traditional tagging into a new era of structured data modeling and validation. At the core of this evolution is Xeto, a purpose-built meta-modeling technology designed to enhance and extend the well-established Haystack tagging methodology. Unlike earlier approaches such as Protos and Defs (used in Haystack 4), or RDF-only models, Xeto introduces:
- Formal schema-based model definition
- Built-in validation and rule enforcement
- Support for inheritance, composition, and typing—making it ideal for APIs, integration pipelines, and automation workflows.
Tagging laid the foundation for Haystack. Now, Xeto brings the structure, precision, and efficiency needed to cost-effectively scale data modeling across increasingly complex systems. In addition to the validation capabilities, Haystack takes a major leap forward toward interoperability with other ontologies.
Project Haystack’s semantic models can now be exported to RDF (via Turtle files) and other data formats enabling interoperability with other ontologies. These new interoperability capabilities of Haystack will provide building owners and other stakeholders the confidence to invest in Haystack and the assurance of interoperability with other ontologies as they emerge.
A Community of Innovation
Haystack Connect 2025 featured real-world use cases from manufacturers, integrators, and building owners applying the Haystack methodology in smart buildings, industrial systems, and renewable energy. The conference reaffirmed Project Haystack’s role as the leader in domain modeling for the built environment and a key enabler of semantic interoperability across ontologies.
Haystack Connect is more than a conference—it is the crucible of innovation for the future of data standards in the built environment and empowering everyone to model, validate, and integrate data.
For more information about Project Haystack, visit www.project-haystack.org.
About Project Haystack
Since its formation in 2011, the Project Haystack Organization has grown tremendously providing the industry with an open-source, collaborative environment where people and companies work together to address the challenge of utilizing semantic modeling to streamline the interchange of device data among software applications.
The devices that make up the Internet of Things—automation systems, metering systems, sensors, and smart devices—produce tremendous amounts of data. This data is hard to organize and use across different applications because it is stored in many different formats, has inconsistent naming conventions, and limited data descriptors. Data lacks information to describe its meaning. Without meaning, a time-consuming manual effort is required before value can be derived from the data.
To address this challenge, the Project Haystack community has defined an easy-to-use methodology to describe the meaning of data using a simple, extensible data-tagging approach and standard models for common equipment systems. The community-developed materials include detailed documentation describing the 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 “Haystack Tags.” These data descriptors allow software applications to automatically consume, interpret, analyze, and present data from IoT devices, smart equipment, and systems.
Project Haystack is a member-driven organization. More information about the Project Haystack Organization, including a list of its members, is available at https://marketing.project-haystack.org.
Contact Data
Marc Petock
Executive Secretary, Project Haystack
Vide President, Chief Marketing & Communications Officer, Lynxspring
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Debbie Bretches
Marketing and Events Coordinator Project Haystack
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