Re: Scope of the Web of Things

On 16/09/13 10:28, Dominique Hazael-Massieux wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Although the phrase "Web of Things" is still far from being as popular
> as "Internet of Things", I feel that it is already being used to refer
> to several distinct concepts; I'm sending what I've heard so far here,
> to see if this matches what others have heard, hopefully to hear what
> others have heard differently, and possibly to converge on a more
> reduced set of meanings, possibly completed with other terminology for
> the other concepts.
>
> * Web of Things as a subset of Internet of Things: the Web of Things
> would be limited to the Things that speak Web, i.e. use HTTP over TCP/IP
> and expose Web formats (e.g. JSON, or XML, or HTML)
>
> * a subset of the above: the Web of Things would be limited to Things
> that speak Web through RESTful interfaces (incl. the HATEOAS principles)
>
> * Web of Things as a particular approach to the Internet of Things:
> bringing a set of higher level interfaces to provide a more uniform
> development platform
>
> * Reaching to the Internet of Things via a Web browser

Your definition is in my opinion too narrow.  For me the Web of Things 
is more about the application of Web technologies to the creation of 
services for things including sensors, actuators, people and "dumb" 
objects such as a bottle of wine which has a virtual presence on the Web 
as a basis for information about the physical object, e.g. the vineyard, 
the vintage, the kind of grapes, etc. Such information could be specific 
to the object rather than the kind of object it is.

The technologies used to connect to devices continue to evolve and are 
certainly not restricted to HTTP.  Examples include devices connected by 
ZigBee and devices tagged with RFID or barcodes.  For things to be part 
of the Web of Things they need a direct or indirect presence on the 
Web.  An indirect presence is often the best solution and is the 
approach adopted by the EU Compose project since it allows for scaling 
to support very large numbers of consumers for each service, and also 
for hiding the details of the communication technologies used by a given 
thing. This second point is key to enabling apps and services to 
continue to work despite changes to the device and local communications 
technologies. For Compose, these details are hidden within the 
implementation of the service objects.  We also anticipate cloud based 
composite services where the service logic is executed in the cloud 
based upon information flows between services and service objects.

Best regards,
  -- Dave Raggett <dsr@w3.org> http://www.w3.org/People/Raggett

Received on Monday, 16 September 2013 11:27:34 UTC