Re: [sensors] Relation to REST APIs and W3C Web of Things activities

Thanks for the list of built-in sensors. I can understand the idea of 
creating an API that scales to the needs of these particular sensors, 
but beyond that a more flexible approach would be appropriate.

For sensors delivering continuous data, it is likely that the history 
of that data is what the app will want to process (e.g. an ECG 
waveform), and the latest value won't be particularly important. The 
way that continuous data is delivered will vary from one sensor to 
another. For example, values at fixed intervals, or at timestamped 
points in time?  You might get parameters describing a piecewise 
approximation to time changing values.

This makes it important to get access to metadata describing a 
particular sensor, or a set of sensors when data is streamed from 
multiple sensors. This calls for a flexible approach to representing 
metadata, and I am curious as to how you intend to support that.

The Web of Things starts with the discovery of a URI for a thing as a 
basis for accessing its metadata. The platform (e.g. server or browser
 library) can then use this to create a proxy object in the script's 
local execution environment, decoupling scripts from the underlying 
bindings to protocols and device drivers.

-- 
GitHub Notif of comment by draggett
See https://github.com/w3c/sensors/issues/18#issuecomment-103150891

Received on Monday, 18 May 2015 18:05:05 UTC