Re: Sensors API : New draft. Includes discovery proposal

Bryan Sullivan wrote:
> I suggest that we use two approaches to inclusion of external sensors:
> - if the user agent has visibility to external sensors due to device
> capability to discover them, it can expose them through the API
> - we need to consider a general purpose in-network service discovery
> capability for which sensor API can be one of the services, like other
> APIs

Given the Networked Service Discovery and Messaginge API proposal [1], 
if the OS or _any_ other process running on a machine advertises their 
own service type over SSDP or DNS-SD and that service then exposes 
access to sensor information via HTTP then we can accomplish this, right?

Your proposal with our proposed Discovery API works for accessing any 
data-based information from a device - contacts, calendar, system 
information, sensors, app data, etc. It immediately reduces the problem 
to one of designing suitable HTTP-based APIs for whatever intended 
purpose you may have without requiring centralized standardization - or 
even collaborative design - of those interfaces up-front. Service types 
naturally form around interface designs which can then be implemented by 
multiple parties to create a psuedo-standard for whatever type of data 
you want to expose. If others don't like it they can simply choose a 
different service type, design a competing API and launch that. The 
process repeats until we get defacto-standard APIs for different device 
data.

- Rich

[1] http://people.opera.com/richt/release/specs/discovery/Overview.html

Received on Thursday, 13 October 2011 09:09:29 UTC