W3C published the report of the W3C Workshop on the Web of Things that was held on 25-26 June 2014, in Berlin (Germany).
This workshop examined the opportunities for open Web standards for service platforms in the network edge and the cloud, along with the challenges for security, privacy and the integration with the Web of data. The Web of Things is expected to develop into a huge market of services, and W3C is well positioned to develop open standards around service platforms, security, privacy, and integration with the Web of data for a Web of services.
The workshop gave a strong message of support for W3C to initiate work on standardization for the Web of Things. The foundations include RESTful HTTP and pub-sub protocols, but the detailed requirements vary across the use cases. Building upon these foundations, the workshop participants identified the need for standards for Web APIs that abstract away from the protocols, including the wide range of IoT technologies used at the network edge to connect to sensors and actuators.
The W3C Web of Things workshop hosted 119 registered participants coming from diverse industry and academic sectors (see a categorization). As a next step, the W3C staff will drive the process of chartering an Interest Group (initial ideas for the charter’s scope are included in the workshop report) through reaching out to an even wider range of interested stakeholders. W3C welcomes feedback and interest, which should be sent to Dave Raggett <dsr@w3.org>.
This project is funded by the European Union through the Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2013-2015) under grant agreement n°611327 - HTML5 Apps.