Here’s the one thing someone needs to invent before the internet of things can take off

Interesting blog post

> a critical piece of the internet of things puzzle remains to be solved. What engineers lack is a universal glue to bind all the of the “things” in the internet of things to each other and to the cloud.


and a little later

> The internet of things has yet to find its HTML

See:

  http://qz.com/158782/heres-the-one-thing-someone-needs-to-invent-before-the-internet-of-things-can-take-off/ <http://qz.com/158782/heres-the-one-thing-someone-needs-to-invent-before-the-internet-of-things-can-take-off/>

This is similar to what Intel’s Mike Bell says:

> Eventually, something like HTML, the language of the web, will be required to make the internet of things realize its potential. “Interoperability is critical”

In essence, the IoT is beset by product silos and a plethora of approaches and platforms with very little interoperability.  We’re beginning to see a repeat of the mobile arena with companies vying to own the ecosystems they set up. Most will fail, leaving a few competing and non-interoperable platforms. This fragmentation presents many challenges to developers who want to deliver services across platforms. The solution will be to expose these platforms through the Web with a new class of web servers that provide an open framework for the Web of Things by analogy with the Web of Pages, enabling world wide discovery and interoperability.

More specifically, we could have web servers that expose “things” as proxies for physical or abstract entities, and model these in terms of events, properties and actions, with bindings to scripting APIs and to a variety of protocols to support REST communication patterns like push, pull, pub-sub and peer to peer. 

A “thing” description language would play the role of HTML, and provide for core metadata and relationships to other things, as a basis for discovery and interoperability through matching both semantics and data formats. Servers could be designed for a wide range of scales from the cloud through to microcontrollers. I am working on a write up with further details, and look forward to presenting this at the upcoming Munich face to face.

If you haven’t already registered and would like to attend the meeting please register as soon as possible so that our hosts are properly prepared.

WoT IG F2F Meeting: https://www.w3.org/WoT/IG/wiki/F2F_meeting:_20-22_April_2015_in_Munich <https://www.w3.org/WoT/IG/wiki/F2F_meeting:_20-22_April_2015_in_Munich>

Registration form: https://www.w3.org/2002/09/wbs/75874/munich15/ <https://www.w3.org/2002/09/wbs/75874/munich15/> 

Looking forward to seeing you all in Munich!
—
   Dave Raggett <dsr@w3.org <mailto:dsr@w3.org>>