Re: YANG inspirations for TD

Hi Dave,

I have made post in relation to https://github.com/w3c/wot/
tree/master/proposals/td-restructuring

By interaction type I mean property/event/action. Proposed version is
similar of how YANG works with its properties, event streams and rpc's.

Thanks for remainding me of commerciall UC's. Sometimes I do not take it
into account. In this case I'm influenced by networking environment. If
term IoT/WoT is used not only for sensors and actuators but at the sense of
Every/Any-thing then network devices are next WoT candidates. Not all of
the network devices use formalized model, but if they use - it is YANG.
Network devices are modeled by  very complex data model with constraints
like min/max in mind. It is heavily used in Software Defined Networking
(SDN) area. There is also translation between YANG and REST. Point is that
YANG is mature and used in production so I think it could be valuable to
have yet another source of knowledge and inspiration.

For me the way how to model data seems tricky. The most sensitive part is
how complex The Thing can become and this comes in response to what is and
what is not the use case for WoT. If WoT can also be services and network
devices, requirements for data modeling can become way too complex - SOAP -
XSD, YANG etc. As well as to have possible model to model translation.  But
that is out of scope for this thread.

Robert



On Mon, Oct 3, 2016 at 11:05 AM, Dave Raggett <dsr@w3.org> wrote:

>
> On 3 Oct 2016, at 07:41, Robert Gallas <gallas.robert@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hi all,
>
> There is and ongoing discussion about thing description (TD). I'd like to
> point community to YANG modelling language (
> https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6020 ) . YANG is built to address very
> same requirements as TD. It has updatable properties, rpc`s, event streams,
> data types etc.
>
> However even YANG is complex language and out of W3C standards it has some
> interesting concepts which can serve as an inspiration for next TD version.
> I mean mainly:
>
> - hierachical data model (helps in model maintainability and supports
> contexts)
> - value constraints (great help at UI generation, widget design and
> reduces network traffic)
> - interaction types concept (good for extensibility)
>
> Hope helps a bit.
>
> Robert
>
>
> Hi Robert,
>
> Thanks for the input.  Could I kindly ask you for an explanation of what
> you refer to as interaction types and how these differ from the data
> models?  In addition, is it possible to point to the use cases and
> requirements?  This would help the Working Group, as every feature needs to
> be grounded in commercially relevant use cases.
>
> Many thanks,
> —
>    Dave Raggett <dsr@w3.org>
>
>
>
>