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 systems, energy management systems, and edge-to-enterprise smart devices. Automation systems and smart devices produce tremendous amounts of connected data.

This data can be very hard to organize and use across different applications when it is stored in many different formats, has inconsistent naming conventions and very limited data descriptors. Without the use of data descriptors, a very time-consuming manual effort is required, sorting through the data and trying to make sense of it all. Without proper analytics, the data from your building automation systems may be rendered obsolete or at the very least, not very useful.

Project Haystack’s purpose is to standardize semantic data models and web services with the goal of making it easier to unlock value from the vast volume of data being generated by the smart devices that permeate our homes, buildings, factories, and cities. Streamlining your building’s data with Project Haystack’s data standardization methodology has benefited system integrators as it has been deployed in over 30,000 facilities globally.

Lynxspring a Supporter and a Founding Member

Lynxspring continues to be a key supporter of Project Haystack and has served and was a founding member of the Board of Directors since its inception in 2011 as a 501 (c) organization. Serving as an open-source initiative, Haystack makes it easier to use data across applications of all types through the standardization of semantic data models and developing tagging/naming conventions for modeling equipment systems and web services.

This mark-up language for your building’s operational data—enables you to see relationships/redundancies, resolve discrepancies, and integrate disparate systems seamlessly together. Its methodology assists National/Enterprise Accounts in designing a well-functioning database, providing a foundation to build practical business processes, implementing best practices, and navigating better business opportunities.

Lynxspring’s leadership role in Haystack community’s initiatives are helping to define, standardize and tag your building’s data in a meaningful way. The community has developed a flexible, extensible, data modeling approach to describe a building’s data. Project Haystack provides you with significant libraries of equipment models, and software reference implementations to easily enable applications to consume smart device data that is marked up with Project Haystack data descriptors.

Advantages of Using Project Haystack

• Initiates a good data management foundation.
• Reduces overall cost of data maintenance.
• Effectively assesses data quality, consistency, and accuracy.
• Ensures version control of your organization’s data.
• Provides a common methodology to organize, exchange and manage data consistently.
• Provides data uniformity supporting a common format for data.
• Interoperability between multiple software tools and applications.
• Establishes an open industry standard to tag your building’s system data.
• Creates data transparency across an organization.
• Cost-effectiveness of implementing analytics.

Lynxspring’s Individual Contribution to Project Haystack

Node-Haystack: The NodeHaystack has been developed to take advantage of the Node.js® platform and all 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 we UIs remotely, off the Haystack server. NodeHaystack is a direct port of Haystack Java Toolkit. 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.