Re: How to attract new members to the WoT IG?

Do you agree that semantics and security are critical to realising the
potential for the Web of Things?


Hi Dave,

Semantics and security are most likely critical to create WoT as well as to
disseminate WoT standards. When things will fall apart in IoT - which is
inevitable because of the lack of security -, then the importance of
security will be realized, and then WoT could find itself in a prime
position to provide standard based security - permit we define and design
security standards within WoT, never mind we have actual demo software code
that implements the standards.

To attract industry experts probably it is important to demonstrate a clear
vision of security in the IG charter and describe briefly what WoT security
will be. We have done some work already in security in the web-of-things
framework and Oliver has done even more. Based on this we could summarize
what the vision is about WOT IoT security and what are the deliverables.
Also, it would be great to recognize the importance of emerging paradigms
such as decentralized, P2P IoT by including them in the deliverables. I am
making effort to progress in this field. I have created already a set of
documents for decentralized, P2P IoT in the web-of-things-framework at
https://github.com/w3c/web-of-things-framework/blob/master/documents/p2p/decentralized_iot.md
as well as in the Tech Landscape document. I will invite members who are
interested in secure, decentralized, peer-to-peer IoT to work together in
defining standards and hopefully we will make some progress together.

Having concrete implementations and reference designs could also help in
attracting experts. There is a fierce competition for the leadership
position in the IoT standardization and without having actual applications
and reference designs probably not easy to drive adoption. If we aim to
come up with actual software code, we outline what are the deliverables
terms of actual software IG charter, that probably will help to gain some
interest. In order to come up with the software probably we should
orchestrate the work. For example I am working on a decentralized P2P IoT
design in the web-of-things-framework. At the same time I read somewhere
that someone else is working on a Telegram WoT integration. Combining those
currently fragmented efforts could help in producing actual software, and
then the industry would see more outcome from WoT.

Regards,
Tibor








On Wed, May 11, 2016 at 3:19 PM, Dave Raggett <dsr@w3.org> wrote:

> What do we need to do in the IG charter to make it easier to attract new
> members?  Before writing a pull request, it makes sense to first discuss
> this challenge and see what ideas emerge and where we have a rough
> consensus.
>
> When talking with people in IoT alliances and other standards development
> organisations, I have seen that there is general agreement on the
> importance of semantic interoperability and security.  W3C is respected for
> its work on standards relating to RDF and linked data, and is expected to
> take the lead on enabling declarative domain models and constraints.
>
> For security, so far each organisation has approached this independently.
> This risks problems for end to end security for services that span
> platforms specified by different organisations.  Without shared trust
> assumptions, parties will only be able to share data that is marked as
> being publicly accessible.  By focusing on inter-platform standards for the
> IoT, W3C has a mission to work with the IoT organisations to encourage
> alignment over trust assumptions for security and how to describe this in
> metadata.
>
> We have very few people currently in the IG with the requisite experience.
> What do we need to do in the new IG charter to help attract such people?
>
> Do you agree that semantics and security are critical to realising the
> potential for the Web of Things?
>
> One idea would be to add explicit deliverables on semantic modelling and
> end to end security, what do you think?
>
> —
>    Dave Raggett <dsr@w3.org>
>
>
>
>