A Fruit farmer is looking for ways to increase productivity
while maintaining excellent product quality.
To monitor and control growing conditions,
the farmer plans to install humidity and temperature sensors, and a sprinkler system.
Weather forecast data from an online web service
would also be useful in order to predict watering requirements.
The farmer decides to engage an IT consultant.
He would like to use the developer of their web presence to realize an IoT solution.
The developers at Web Agency like the new challenge
and are willing to broaden their IoT knowledge.
They are experts in both web frontend and backend technologies using Node JS.
However, they are worried about the interoperability problems
that they experienced in a previous IoT project.
After searching online for a solution,
the developers find information on the Web of Things, WoT
WoT is a W3C standard that enables Web developers to become IoT developers
using the tools and frameworks they love.
WoT can be applied to many different IoT domains,
such as Manufacturing or Building Automation,
but is also applicable to our farmer's problem in the Agriculture domain.
The developers are happy to find a bunch
of WoT tutorials on thingweb.io, YouTube, and GitHub.
With node-wot, various protocol bindings
like HTTP, MQTT, CoAP, and Modbus,
and a browser bundle, the developers easily create a full stack IoT solution.
Their solution connects all the devices
and includes a great user interface built with web technology.
Instead of creating a one-off, proprietary solution,
the developers use the WoT methodology to create IoT building blocks.
These building blocks extend their existing Web technologies portfolio.
Thing Descriptions, WoT application templates,
and IoT semantics are now in the same portfolio of reusable modules
as HTML pages, JavaScript packages, or CSS from former web projects.
The main element of the WoT methodology
is the Thing Description, also known as a Tee-Dee.
The TD is comparable to an index.html for Things.
Various questions can be answered by the information in the TD
TD like Identification, Data organization, Access, Units, Types, Interactions, Security or Relationships.
Classical IoT projects usually cause high costs,
especially due to the high integration effort
of the different data models and protocols of the devices or services.
In contrast, with WoT the developers create the IoT solution in just a few sprints
by combining WoT TDs, protocol bindings, and scripting with their web expertise.
This leads to reduction in development and maintenance costs,
saving time and money.
The developers gain confidence in IoT
and from now on consider themselves experts in both Web and IoT technologies.
Based on WoT the farmer's IoT project could be easy realized.
Now the developers are ready to tackle their next IoT challenge.
And yes, WoT is THE methodology they will use!