Re: Representative sample of industry protocols

> On 25 Oct 2016, at 13:31, Benjamin Francis <bfrancis@mozilla.com> wrote:
> 
> On 25 October 2016 at 10:32, Dave Raggett <dsr@w3.org <mailto:dsr@w3.org>> wrote:
> I love HTTP, and initiated its standardisation in the IETF in the nineties, but the wide variation in requirements across different application domains means that the Web of things can’t be limited to HTTP and WebSockets.  That said, I agree that defining protocol bindings to HTTP should be a high priority given its widespread use for connecting gateways to the cloud.
> 
> Hi Dave,
> 
> Of course I recognise your incredibly long history of contributions to the web, but I don't think I understand your definition of the Web of Things. How would you describe the Web of Things if not giving Things URLs on the web?

Things can have URLs (or more generally URIs) that act as their names and which can be used to access their descriptions.  This is independent of which protocol is used to access the platform hosting a thing. 

> Surely if non-web protocols such as those you have listed are being used rather than web protocols then what you're talking about is the Internet of Things, but by definition not the Web of Things?

I see the Web of things as an abstraction layer above the IoT.  Things are named with URIs that can be used to access their descriptions. These descriptions may refer to other things, thereby forming a Web of things. The thing descriptions allow a platform to figure out how to access things hosted by another platform. Thing descriptions play an analogous role to HTML for the Web of pages in that they can be downloaded by software agents and spidered by search engines (subject to access control restrictions).

For a gateway that hosts one or more things, the gateway itself could expose both the thing description and the REST API for accessing things as URLs for the HTTP server hosted by that gateway. 

Thing descriptions are more general than representations designed specifically for describing REST APIs. This allows us to integrate  protocols that are not based upon REST. This is made possible by separating the description of the object model exposed to applications (properties, actions, events) from the usage of the protocols.

—
   Dave Raggett <dsr@w3.org <mailto:dsr@w3.org>>