AW: [WoT-IG]: Comments on proposed charter for WoT WG

Von: Dave Raggett [mailto:dsr@w3.org]


The point about having an out of scope section is mainly to assist companies with their IPR review of the potential patent licensing commitments in respect to the W3C Recommendations produced by a given working group. I would propose we drop this bullet point from the charter as it is proving complex to explain and justify.

This interesting to know. Is there also a mechanism to focus the work within an W3C WG?

The nearest precedent I could find relates to XPath and XPointer. W3C defined a registry for XPointer Scheme Names, for use in URI fragments, see [1].  The URI specification is owned by the IETF and defines a generic syntax for URI fragments, but the meaning of these fragments is dependent on the resource identified by the URI, e.g. whether it is HTML, XML, etc. There has been some work done on an analog of XPath for JSON, e.g. Stefan Goessner's JSONPath, see [2]. However, as far as I am aware, there is no official standard for that. RFC690 defines a less powerful approach called JSON Pointer, see [3], which may be good enough for most purposes.

Unfortunately, I cannot see how this relates to the issue at hand. In Nice, we were talking about using URIs to be able to abstract from protocol-specific addressing. Whatever a protocol uses should be formatted in a simple string that can be included in the TD or handled uniformly by the runtime environment to enable communication from scripts to things. This is completely unrelated to pointers/addressing within documents. State of the art is anyway to use semantically enriched schemas to make documents machine-understandable.

I am talking about, for instance, putting BLE addressing information into a string like "ble://*********" or BACnet-specific addressing into a string like "bacnet://*******". Again, the WG should only work on the mechanism to use such string to handle protocol-specific addressing information uniformly in the TD and Scripting API. This string is then passed down to the stack and the Protocol Binding takes care of producing the correctly addressed and serialized messages.

Let's leave the question of whether it is appropriate to define new URI addressing schemes to the experts for that protocol!

Exactly. Hence, simply put defining new URI schemes out of scope for the WoT WG, no?

Best wishes,
Matthias