The Web of Things is Coming Soon

Break-out Session

Moderators

• Rich Tibbett, Opera
• Dave Raggett, W3C
• Jacques Bourhis, Intel

The Web has extended beyond desktop computers, and is now starting to embrace the world of things

What is the Web of Things?

Markets of Services

With thanks to the EU Compose Project.

What is the Web of Things?

Many use cases, many challenges!

Smart Cities

Smart Cities

Smart Meters

Open Source Hardware

Plus lots of sensors, actuators and communications modules

Publishing your sensor data

With thanks to Xively, formerly known as Cosm

Web of Things

A Web of services with scripts, data, metadata and physical things

• RESTful HTTP, Web Sockets, etc. for communication
• JavaScript APIs acting on local proxies
• Overlay networking model to hide information that is best dealt with at a lower level of abstraction
• Rich descriptions and live context management
• Distributed processing (in devices and in the cloud)
  • Sticky policies for privacy and access control
• Re-establishing control over your personal devices, apps, services and data
  • Personal Zones

Overlay Network Model

Decoupling applications and services from things best dealt with at a lower level in the stack

• Constantly Evolving Interconnect technologies
  • WiFi, Weightless, ZigBee, CoAP & 6LoWPAN, NFC, BlueTooth & BLE, ANT, Infrared, USB, IEEE 1394, DASH7, KNX for buildings, EnOcean, GPRS/3G/4G, WiMAX, ...
• Some devices are low powered, requiring gateways
  • Pushing storage and computation close to the edge
• Mix of discovery technologies, e.g. mDNS, UPnP
  • Plus federated and intent-based search across the Internet
• Heterogeneous mix of old and new devices
  • Ensuring applications work with yesterday's and tomorrow's devices
  • Establishing design principles for fault tolerance

Objects as Proxies for Services

Scripts running within browser, or embedded agent or in the cloud.

Services as Public and Private Agents Acting on Our Behalf

Personal Zones

Pluggable Cloud-Based Services

A Web of Services

• Services can bind to sensors or actuators (things)
• A Web of value added services that feed into each other
• Biological metaphor with pipelines for perception or actuation
  • The Web of Things as a kind of planet-wide living organism
• Detecting significant events from patterns in noisy data
• Progressively higher levels of interpretation that combines sensory data with knowledge of goals and context
• Control systems that map high level intents into coordinated control of actuators
• Challenges of security, access control, provenance, ...
• Business models involving licensing and payments

Cloud based Services

• Compose is an EU FP7 project aiming to create an open source cloud-based platform for a market of services for the Internet of Things
• Services are created by developers and registered with the marketplace
• Services defined with mix of scripts, JSON and JSON-LD (metadata)
• Services that bind to sensors or actuators
• Services that process data from other services
• Apps provide a user interface for services
• Strong focus on security, provenance and privacy

What is W3C doing about
the Web of Things?

• Plans for W3C Web of Things Workshop in mid-2014
• W3C Web of Things Community Group*
  • http://www.w3.org/community/wot/
  • We plan to initiate regular teleconferences for the Web of Things CG to discuss the scope and next steps, and to help with the workshop
• W3C has quite of lot of related work already underway ...
  • Discovery of devices and services
  • Sensors, e.g. location, proximity, ambient light, ...
  • Rich media, e.g. video and audio
  • Rich data, e.g. linked data and work on shared vocabularies
  • Security and privacy

We want to hear from you!

• The role of Web technologies for providing services based upon the Internet of Things and what is needed to enable an open market of services
• What areas of W3C are relevant?
• What use cases for the Web of Things that you see in the next few years, e.g. home automation, healthcare, smart cities, ...
• What are the obstacles to connecting with devices and integrating with Internet/Web stack?
• What areas of W3C work are most relevant to you? Or what's missing from our agenda?
• What standards efforts in other orgs do you think we need to be aware of?

You are welcome to raise other questions.