Proposal: WoT Profiles 1.0 Registry

Hi,

Further to the Call for Resolution
<https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-wot-wg/2025Jul/0024.html> to
publish WoT Profiles 1.0 as a Group Note as per the plan agreed in a previous
Working Group resolution
<https://www.w3.org/2025/05/21-wot-minutes.html#335a>, it appears that
there is now some uncertainty about whether the latest W3C Process
<https://www.w3.org/policies/process/> will allow us to switch from the
Recommendation Track to the Note Track in order to do this.

We may therefore have a situation where W3C Process may prevent us from
publishing as a Group Note, but there may also not be sufficient consensus
within the Working Group to proceed along the Recommendation track with the
document in its current form. This could force us to publish the Profiles
1.0 specification as a Discontinued Draft, which the group has agreed would
not be a very satisfactory outcome since it does not accurately represent
the current state of the document.

I hope to continue to discuss this with W3C Staff to clarify exactly what
the issue is with switching tracks, and whether it could be feasible for us
to continue with a Group Note as per the consensus of the Working Group.

In the meantime, I wanted to present a potential "wildcard" option to
resolve the deadlock.

*Profiles 1.0 Registry*

The idea is to split the individual profiles out of the current WoT
Profiles specification as separate documents, and reduce the Profiles
specification itself to defining only the profiling *mechanism* and a
registry of profiles (in the form of a table). Each individual profile
would become a new Group Note. This would result in four documents:

   - WoT Profiles 1.0 (Candidate Recommendation)
      - Profiling Mechanism
      - Profile Registry
   - WoT HTTP Basic Profile (Group Note)
   - WoT HTTP SSE Profile (Group Note)
   - WoT HTTP Webhook Profile (Group Note)

To help illustrate this I have mocked up what this cut-down version of WoT
Profiles 1.0 could look like, and temporarily hosted it here
<https://benfrancis.github.io/wot-profile/>.

What is neat about this is that it is an approach we have discussed taking
for Profiles 2.0 as well.

An advantage of this approach is that we already seem to have broad
consensus on the general need for a profiling mechanism, and multiple
existing implementations of the mechanism as currently defined. Publishing
only the mechanism as a Candidate Recommendation means we don't necessarily
need multiple implementations of every individual profile in order to
continue along the Recommendation Track, with the individual profiles being
published as Group Notes.

A disadvantage is that the Profiles task force would likely have to spend
the next two to three months working on these modified documents, rather
than kicking off work on Use Cases & Requirements for Profiles 2.0.

---

My strong preference is still to publish WoT Profiles 1.0 as a Group Note
in its current form, as per the Working Group consensus. But if that turns
out not to be feasible then what do people think about this alternative
approach? Would you be happy for this cut-down version of WoT Profiles 1.0
to proceed to Candidate Recommendation?

Kind regards

Ben

-- 
Ben Francis
Founder
Krellian Ltd. <https://krellian.com>