W3C Endorses the Web of Things (WoT) with Architecture, Thing Description Recommendations

The Web of Things (WoT), designed to progress the Internet of Things (IoT) in the same way the World Wide Web did the Internet, is now officially endorsed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), following its adoption of the WoT Architecture and WoT Description standards as official Recommendations.

The Web of Things is primarily the concept of adopting architectures and programming patterns to bring real world objects to the World Wide Web by reusing existing standards from HTTP and REST through to WebSockets and OAuth. The primary organization behind the WoT, the Web of Things Interest Group, began work no a series of standards in 2017, culminating in the WoT Architecture and WoT Thing Description — now official W3C Recommendations.

"Many Internet of Things applications have been developed for areas as diverse as Smart factory, Smart city, Smart home and public health," explains W3C chief executive Jeff Jaffe. "By standardizing the web level descriptions of Things, we intend to promote interoperability in these important areas."

The Web of Things Architecture specification describes, in abstract, the architecture of W3C's vision for the Web of Things — based on an analysis of use cases across multiple domains carried out by the WoT Interest Group. The WoT Thing Description, meanwhile, offers a formal model and common representation for the metadata and interfaces that can be used by Things — encoded in JSON format.

The move to Recommendation status has been applauded by those in industry. "This new WoT Standard takes a step forward in addressing the fundamental problem holding back the commercial success of IOT: The challenge of connecting different systems and domains," claims Intel's Eric Siow. "It provides a solution to enable different systems and domains to communicate and share data."

"The interoperability, the WoT standard trying to solve, remains the biggest challenge in IoT. The newly defined Web interface in WoT not only provides unified control over a various IoT devices, but also enables integration with many business systems using Web technologies," adds Fujitsu's Shingo Mizuno. "In addition, Metadata describing the device functions and Protocol Binding mapping to the device interfaces can also be applied to new communications technologies such as 5G, which are expected to become widespread in the future. Fujitsu believe that WoT is an indispensable technology and will have a significant impact on the digitisation of our customers' systems."

While the standards are only now official Recommendations, they've been in use for some time already: W3C highlights a Building Management Station system developed by Siemens Desigo CC using the Web of Things, Node-RED's support for the WoT Thing Description, Mozilla's WebThings platform, and the Node.JS node-wot reference implementation as evidence of their applicability in a range of scenarios.

Work continues, however, with the WoT Working Group investigating means of making it easier to securely on-board Things into the Web of Things, improve interoperability still further, add new protocols and new standard metadata, add new security schemes, create standardized discovery mechanisms for self-describing devices, among other improvements.

More information is available on the W3C Web of Things site, with dedicated pages for the WoT Architecture and WoT Thing Description Recommendations.