Haystack Connect Presentations Now Available

Haystack Connect was a fantastic event for J2 Innovations this year. The event followed the format of a general session and multiple tracks: technical, applications in the real world, and even a track for people new to Project Haystack.

The General Session

John Petze and Marc Petock set the tone of the event with their opening remarks on the importance of working collaboratively towards a common goal.

"The goal of Haystack has always been to bring together the constituents affected by the challenge of data interoperability – to work together to address the challenge of making data easily interoperable across all the of the boundaries in the built environment."

For Newbies

There was a special session that introduced tagging and data modeling and the application of tagging in the real world. John Petze started us off  by describing what Project Haystack is and how it works. Mark Petock covered who Project Haystack is for and why it is important, and our own Scott Muench discussed the payoffs and how Project Haystack is applied today.

Project Haystack Is… An open source, worldwide community of people working to address the need for a standard semantic data modeling method for device data.

Project Haystack Provides… A standardized methodology for describing data that makes it easier and more cost effective to analyze, visualize, and derive value from our operational data through a standard vocabulary (tag sets) and taxonomies (equipment models) developed by consensus of the community.

The Payoffs of using Project Haystack... It enables applications that just work by making the integration among software applications easier, apps can understand and consume data without human interaction to “map” information.  One example of that is J2 Innovations' FIN Framework, which automates much of the configurations and engineering process. Click to read more about the 7 Payoffs of Haystack Tagging in the FIN Framework. 

For OEMs

In the Benefits of Haystack Tagging for OEMs, J2's Ryan Schlotfeldt joined Marc Petock, James Johnson, Todd Lash, and Jason Houck for a panel discussion. This session was a forum of OEMs who use Project Haystack to bring new products to the market. They shared their stories to inspire other OEMs to adopt and participate in the Haystack Working Groups as well as help raise awareness for end customers about products that leverage Haystack.

Haystack Globally

Our very own Alex Rohweder and Chris Irwin presented on the opportunities and insights for The Value of Tagging in Building Automation in Europe. Although Project Haystack started in and is predominantly used in North America, interest is growing globally (as demonstrated at the recent ISH 2019 Conference).

In their session, they outlined how Project Haystack can become more pervasive Internationally.

1. Manufacturers need to start driving the standard into Europe.
2. There are quite a few open standards in the European market (KNX, DALI, M-Bus, LoRa, and DLMS) that Haystack needs to work with.
3. Haystack needs to make it even more transparent for Europeans how the standard is evolving. There is interest in a European meetup of Haystack community members.
4. Smart buildings are different in Europe versus North America. They're smaller, less standardized, and are highly integrated. The standard needs to incorporate European specifics, which encompass multiple languages, countries, and markets.

The New Haystack Standard

Brian Frank presented Haystack 4.0 in the technical track. This new version of Haystack adds data-modeling features that support the implementation of both a taxonomy and the resulting ontologies that define the relationship of things and between things. Learn more about the technical details from Brian's presentation.

We dove into some of the exciting changes in a recent blog. You can read it here.

Want to learn more?

There were so many great presentations at the conference this year! The entire collection of presentations from Haystack Connect are available for download here. Using the conference schedule, the session titles are hyperlinked to the downloadable presentation.