I am in no way wanting to sound critical of all of these great efforts.

I am trying to understand how Project Haystack gives us something other than what we already have in the ISO Standard IFC 4.0?

ISO 16739:2013 Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) for data sharing in the construction and facility management industries. http://www.iso.org/iso/iso_catalogue/catalogue_tc/catalogue_detail.htm?csnumber=51622

It seems like we may be reinventing the wheel. Can anyone help me better understand the value of Haystack over or in addition to IFC?

Thanks.

Its a good question. I think at the core, the two efforts come very different design centers:

• IFC comes from construction/architecture industry with strong focus on physical building, materials, etc
• Haystack comes from the control system/operations industry with a strong focus on the operational data generated by control systems

There is definitely some overlap, but I haven't really seen a lot. We spend 95% of our modeling effort on the definition of points such as sensors, actuators, set-points, etc. Hopefully these worlds will meld and we can start sharing work.

Other differences:

• we are focused on protocol/data formats to communicate in real-time to control systems
• IFC uses a statically typed metamodel, we use a dynamic more duck typing data model
• we run Haystack as an open source project versus a traditional standards organization