The mission of this group is to define a common protocol for communicating with connected devices over the web, to enable ad-hoc interoperability on the Web of Things.
Deliverables of the group may include use cases, requirements and specifications.
The group will collaborate with the W3C Web of Things Interest Group and Working Group to ensure any specifications complement or extend the “Web of Things (WoT) Thing Description” specification.
Objectives:
Define a WebSocket sub-protocol for the Web of Things, using the W3C “Web of Things (WoT) Thing Description” data model and operations
Define an HTTP protocol binding for the Web of Things (or support the Web of Things Working Group in defining this protocol binding and ensuring consistency with the WebSocket sub-protocol where appropriate)
Evaluate other potential Web of Things protocol bindings (e.g. CoAP)
Note: Community Groups are proposed and run by the community. Although W3C hosts these
conversations, the groups do not necessarily represent the views of the W3C Membership or staff.
The Web Thing Protocol provides a WebSocket sub-protocol for monitoring and controlling connected devices over the Web, specifically designed around the Web of Things information model. It defines message payload formats for each of the operation types defined in the WoT Thing Description specification and makes it possible to carry out the full set of WoT operations on one or more WoT Things over a single WebSocket connection.
The Web Thing Protocol is intended to be used by IoT gateways, cloud services, and even directly by connected devices themselves. Often it will likely be used as a web-based abstraction on top of another underlying IoT protocol like Zigbee, Z-Wave, HomeKit, Matter, Modbus or BACnet – to enable an open ecosystem of IoT web services which link together otherwise incompatible IoT platforms.
The Web Thing Protocol Community Group would now like to encourage implementations of this early draft of the Web Thing Protocol, so that the specification can be improved based on implementation experience and interoperability testing. Please be aware that this is a very early draft of the specification which is likely to undergo significant changes during its incubation in the community group, before hopefully joining a formal standards track at the W3C.
Anyone can join a W3C Community Group for free, so if you are interested in contributing then we encourage you to join us to help further refine this powerful new Web of Things protocol. You can read the latest draft of the specification, subscribe to our public mailing list, file issues on GitHub and chat with us in the #web-thing-protocol channel on the Web of Things Community Discord server. If you intend to implement the specification we’d love it if you could share your “intent to implement” on our mailing list.
As with all W3C specifications the Web Thing Protocol is a royalty free open standard which anyone is free to use, so we can’t wait to see what you do with it!
This specification is intended to facilitate the incubation of a dedicated real-time protocol for the Web of Things (WoT), to enable a WoT Consumer to communicate with one or more WoT Things over a WebSocket connection in order to monitor and control connected devices over the Web.
The Web of Things (WoT) is a collection of standardised technology building blocks that help provide interoperability on the Internet of Things (IoT). The WoT Thing Description specification defines a metadata format for describing the capabilities of “Things” (connected devices) on the Web. The WoT Discovery specification defines mechanisms for discovering Things on the Web. This specification complements those building blocks by incubating a dedicated real-time protocol for communicating with Things over the Web.
The intention is for this specification to eventually join a standards track at the W3C or another standards body.
Following a significant number of comments from Community Group members on an initial strawman proposal, we have now started work on the formal community group report.
If you are interested in contributing to or implementing the Web Thing Protocol in your product, service or project we welcome you to join the Community Group and share your “intent to implement” on our public mailing list.
You are also welcome to join the #web-thing-protocol Discord channel to chat about our work.
This report defines the requirements for a common protocol for the Web of Things, and is the group’s first published final report. The group will now begin work on its core deliverables, as per the group’s charter:
The mission of this group is to define a common protocol for communicating with connected devices over the web, to enable ad-hoc interoperability on the Web of Things.
Deliverables of the group may include use cases, requirements and specifications.
The group will collaborate with the W3C Web of Things Interest Group and Working Group to ensure any specifications complement or extend the “Web of Things (WoT) Thing Description” specification.
Objectives:
Define a WebSocket sub-protocol for the Web of Things, using the W3C “Web of Things (WoT) Thing Description” data model and operations
Define an HTTP protocol binding for the Web of Things (or support the Web of Things Working Group in defining this protocol binding and ensuring consistency with the WebSocket sub-protocol where appropriate)
Evaluate other potential Web of Things protocol bindings (e.g. CoAP)
This is a community initiative. This group was originally proposed on 2019-09-16 by Ben Francis. The following people supported its creation: Ben Francis, Gustavo Zapico, Junde Yhi, Zoltan Kis, Dave Raggett. W3C’s hosting of this group does not imply endorsement of the activities.
w3c/web-thing-protocol/
