Project Haystack to Provide Common Data Context for Smart Cities and Buildings

  Overview

If the age of digitalization has provided us with anything, it is lots of data.  Millions of data points from millions of sensors are connected to an increasingly wide range of systems and applications.  Turning all these data into useful information is a tremendous challenge.  Data comes in widely varying formats, with different vendors handling and expressing data in different ways.  Different protocols also have different ways of expressing data, and the lack of a single standard protocol in smart cities and building automation compounds the issue. 

Enter Project Haystack; an open (and open source), vendor-independent initiative to provide contextualization to the large amounts of data being generated by operational technology (OT)-level systems in the building automation and smart cities space.  Project Haystack relies on data modeling approaches to provide a common context for data coming from all types of systems and devices used in the building automation/smart cities world. 

The Cost of Point-to-Point Integration

Lack of common context for data comes with a cost.  In today’s smart city implementation projects, much of the integration between systems and applications must be done in a point-to-point fashion with the aid of systems integrator or engineering firm.  This is a great cost to end uses and owner- operators.  When looking at smart city software and system implementation projects, custom integration can account for more than half of the overall project cost.  This offers a significant business opportunity and potential to reduce both project and operational costs, since these custom-integrated environments must be maintained and tended to throughout their lifecycles. 

Project Haystack

Consolidating data into a common environment or context is necessary to turn that data into the useful information needed to make informed decisions about how to run our cities, communities, buildings, and more.  This is where Project Haystack comes in.  This open industry initiative focuses on providing a common metadata methodology for building automation, smart city, and other applications. 

According to Project Haystack Executive Director, John Petze, “The challenge in our domain (building systems) is that device data are stored in many different formats, communicated via numerous protocols, have inconsistent non-standard naming conventions, and have very limited descriptors to enable us to understand meaning without direct human knowledge of the device producing the data.  Ideally, we want data to be self-describing.  Without that, a time-consuming manual effort is required before data can be used effectively to generate value.”

Structure and Purpose

Project Haystack was formed in 2014 as a 501(c) tax-exempt, non-stock corporation.  Its stated function is to serve as: a trade association with the purpose of fostering the common association and interests of software and technology companies focused on developing semantic modeling solutions for data related to smart devices including: building equipment systems, automation and control devices, sensors and sensing devices, promotion and education with respect to the semantic data modeling industry for building automation systems, and to engage in educational activities directed towards the improvement of business conditions of the semantic data modeling industry for smart device data.  All work developed by the Project Haystack community is provided for use as open source software under the Academic Free License 3.0.

More Than Just Data Tagging

Project Haystack’s vision is to streamline the use of IoT data by creating a standardized approach to defining “data semantics,” related services, and APIs to consume and share the data and its semantic descriptors.  Project Haystack aims to make data "self-describing" by relying heavily on data modeling methodology.  Its tagging approach can be used in media from Excel spreadsheets and CSV text files, to data tables in embedded devices, XML representations, Web services, and others.

Haystack also includes consensus developed tagging libraries (taxonomies) published and made available for download and use (at no cost).  Haystack also encompasses the REST communication protocol designed to exchange Haystack tags between applications.  The group is also developing reference implementations and complementary applications are also being developed by various community members and companies. 

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Keywords: Smart Cities, Building Automation, Project Haystack, ARC Advisory Group.