Project Haystack

What is Project Haystack?

Project Haystack is an open-source initiative to streamline working with data from the Internet of Things. We standardize semantic data models and web services with the goal of making it easier to unlock value from the vast quantity of data being generated by the smart devices that permeate our homes, buildings, factories, and cities. Applications include automation, control, energy, HVAC, lighting, and other environmental systems.

Lynxspring has been a Project Haystack supporter and contributor since its inception in 2011. The company is a founding member of the 501c organization and serves on the Board of Directors.

Project Haystack is focused on developing semantic modeling conventions and taxonomies for smart devices and equipment systems. The community has developed a flexible, extensible, data modeling approach and standard models for describing the data modeling techniques, significant libraries of equipment models, and software reference implementations to easily enable software applications to consume smart device data that is marked up with Project Haystack data descriptions.

Why is Lynxspring involved?

Today, companies in virtually every industry are using enterprise business software to fuel their growth. These enterprise systems are fed data from CRMs, accounting systems, inventory management, and most recently, building automation, energy management systems, and edge-to-enterprise smart devices.

The amount of data created by equipment, systems and devices connected to a building automation or energy management system has exploded. Today's automation systems and smart devices produce tremendous amounts of data, however, this data can be very hard to organize and use across different applications because it is stored in many different formats; has inconsistent naming conventions and very limited data descriptors. It lacks information to describe the meaning of the data. And without meaning a time-consuming manual effort is required before analysis and value creation can begin. And without proper analytics, this data is not useful. Lynxspring’s involvement and initiatives in Project Haystack are helping to do that.

Lynxspring’s Contribution

Node-Haystack: The NodeHaystack has been developed to take advantage of the Node.js® platform and all of its benefits. NodeHaystack provides a fully scalable, fast server interface, for anyone wishing to implement a Haystack server of their own. In addition, because it is written in JavaScript, this technology can be used in the browser itself to connect to other Project Haystack implementations and build rich web UIs remotely, off the Haystack server. NodeHaystack is a direct port of Haystack Java Toolkit, and provides all of the functionality of the de-facto standard for Project Haystack server development. In addition to the core functionality, Lynxspring has added the ability to accept JSON encoded input, instead of ZINC, to aid in the development of pure JavaScript environments.

Learn More About Project Haystack

www.project-haystack.org