W3C Web of Things meetings in Beijing, July 2016

The W3C Web of Things Interest Group met 11-14 July 2016 in Beijing, China, hosted by the China Electronics Technology Group  Corporation (CETC), the W3C/Beihang Host and the China IoT Industry Technology Innovation Strategic Alliance (CIoTA). The event was co-located with the CIoTA’s 2016 International Open IoT Technology and Standard Summit.

The first two days were open to local companies and institutions. We had talks from a broad range of participants, and many demonstrations from both the CETC and W3C. We learned about CETC’s IoT open system architecture, and its implementation by Beijing Wuliangang Ltd. as the cloud-based E-Harbour IoT platform, and enjoyed; live demonstrations in relation to smart homes, smart communities and smart buildings. W3C returned the favour with integrated demonstrations of the Web of Things by Siemens, Panasonic, Fujitsu, Lemonbeat and Samsung’s SmartThings.

Please read more in Matthias Kovatsch' summary in the Web of Things Interest Group Blog.

The Web of Things aims to counter fragmentation of the IoT and enable an open market of services, spanning a wide range of standards and platforms from microcontrollers to cloud-based server farms. Our approach focuses on cross platform APIs for simplifying application development, and the role of metadata for enabling different platforms to interoperate with each other.

The last two days were devoted to progressing the work items of the Web of Things Interest Group. We had sessions focusing on a broad range of technical topics, e.g. protocol bindings, data types for application scripting, thing lifecycles, scripting APIs, and proposals for collaborative work with other organisations on building a shared understanding of how to enable semantic interoperability across different platforms. The Interest Group is now being rechartered for a further two years. We are also progressing plans for a Web of Things Working Group which we hope will launch in October 2016, and which will seek to create standards from the ideas explored by the Interest Group. The Interest Group’s next face to face meeting will be in Lisbon, Portugal on 22-23 September 2016 as part of the W3C annual get together (TPAC 2016).