AW: Project Things by Mozilla and the Web Thing API

Dear Benjamin

Thank you for sharing the announcement of Project Things directly with us and please excuse the delay in our reaction. We are having our face-to-face meeting this week and wanted to use it to discuss your input openly in the group – which we did: Your proposal serves as good feedback and evaluation of our working assumptions. We also see the common ground and at the same time have conclusions on some parts where we differ. Let’s put this into productive conversations.

Would you be able to join our weekly main call on Wednesday [1] and give a “commented” introduction to Project Things? July 26th or August 9th would be good options on our side (let’s try this before opening a Doodle).

Until then we can of course have individual discussions on the mailing list as Dave already started.

Best wishes,
Matthias, Michael, and Kazuo (WoT WG co-chairs)

[1] https://www.w3.org/WoT/IG/wiki/Main_WoT_WebConf



Von: Benjamin Francis [mailto:bfrancis@mozilla.com]
Gesendet: Dienstag, 4. Juli 2017 20:27
An: public-wot-ig; public-wot-wg@w3.org
Betreff: Project Things by Mozilla and the Web Thing API

Hi all,

I wanted to give this group a heads up that last week we announced<https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/06/building-the-web-of-things/> Project Things<http://iot.mozilla.org/> by Mozilla. This includes an open source Web of Things gateway<http://iot.mozilla.org/gateway/> implementation and a draft Web Thing API<http://iot.mozilla.org/wot/>.

You can read more about the rationale<http://iot.mozilla.org/specification/> behind our specification on the website but the basic idea is to take a more pragmatic and concrete approach to the Web of Things using existing web technologies, with a JSON based Web Thing Description format and a REST + WebSockets API. All of our source code<https://github.com/mozilla-iot/> is on GitHub.

The Web Thing Description<http://iot.mozilla.org/wot/#web-thing-description> format we've been working on is not dissimilar to the current draft<https://w3c.github.io/wot-thing-description> by the W3C Web of Things Working Group, but with less of a focus on RDF and the semantic web and more focus on a concrete JSON encoding which web developers can get started with straight away. (In this way it has some things in common with the W3C's Web App Manifest<https://www.w3.org/TR/appmanifest/> specification which went through several complex iterations at the System Applications Working Group<https://www.w3.org/2012/sysapps/> before a much simpler approach ultimately proved successful.)

The Web Thing Types<http://iot.mozilla.org/wot/#web-thing-types> are designed to be extensible with JSON-LD<http://iot.mozilla.org/wot/#extensibility-with-json-ld>, but this is secondary to defining the core description format. The Web Thing REST API<http://iot.mozilla.org/wot/#web-thing-rest-api> and Web Thing WebSocket API<http://iot.mozilla.org/wot/#web-thing-websocket-api> have similar use cases to the W3C WoT Working Group's Scripting API<https://w3c.github.io/wot-scripting-api/>, but again the focus is on defining a concrete programmable interface using existing web technologies rather than an abstract scripting API.

We have slightly different views regarding the approach to standardisation than the one described by the current WoT WG Charter (as communicated via our formal objections), but I hope we can continue to have productive conversations - particularly around the Web Thing Description format where I think we have a lot of common ground. I would particularly like to credit the Web Thing Model<http://model.webofthings.io/> member submission from members of the WoT IG and Web of Things community which did a lot to inspire our work and we're keen to hear from others with a like-minded pragmatic approach to this space.

We're really just getting started in IoT at Mozilla and we're excited to learn more through our open source implementation and through working closely with the hacker/maker/developer community. We look forward to receiving feedback<https://github.com/mozilla-iot/wot/issues>.

Best Wishes

Ben