minutes and actions from call on WoT & iotivity/OCF

We had a call today with Markus Jung (Siemens), who is based in Seoul, Korea, to discuss opportunities for creating a demo that integrates iotivity with the web of things.  Iotivity [1] is an open source implementation of the OCF specifications [2].  We agreed that a reasonable target for the demo would be TPAC 2016 on 19-23 September in Lisbon.

The primary aim would be to show how an application on another platform can use thing description as the basis for interacting with sensors/actuators on a device running iotivity. A secondary aim would be to show how the discovery API proposed by Louay could be used on top of the discovery mechanisms implemented by iotivity.

Iotivity is available as a plugin for the eclipse IDE on Linux with ports under development for Windows and iOS. This provides an emulator for devices conforming to the OCF specifications. Iotivity is also available for embedded systems running Linux, but is not suitable for microcontrollers with just kilobytes of RAM. 

Iotivity supports CoAP including the multicast discovery mechanisms defined for CoAP. There is also an API for registering with an external repository. In our discussions, we agreed that run-time access to metamodels such as the WoT IG thing descriptions would be a useful complement to the OCF work. Markus further agreed that data integrity constraints would be interesting to look at. Matthias noted that OCF could normatively reference a W3C Recommendation for Thing Descriptions if the proposed WoT WG can drive this along the Recommendation track in a timely manner.

Kevin Gavigan (JLR) attended the call on behalf of the W3C Automotive WG to learn about iotivity.  It looks like the Auto WG could provide valuable use cases and requirements for the WoT IG work on thing descriptions. Moreover, it would be interesting to consider automotive demos for the Web of Things. Kaz took an action to initiate a dialog on this between the Automotive groups and the Wot IG.

For the iotivity demo, we decided to work on a document that sets out the aims and plans for the demo, and to have a first version of this ready by the end of June. One use of this document is to get management support for the demo, e.g. for Samsung to agree to Markus investing some time and travel to Lisbon for TPAC. We would then plan to have a follow on call either at the end of June or soon after the WoT IG’s Beijing meeting. Matthias took an action to create a markdown document in the WoT IG’s github repository and to do some initial work on it, with the help of Markus and others.  We didn’t decide on the use case for the demo, and this is something that could be clarified as we discuss ideas for what we want to emphasise for the Lisbon PlugFest.

The meeting participants were: Markus, Carsten, Kaz, Kevin, Matthias, Dave, and Soumya. My thanks to Kaz for taking the minutes, see:

         http://www.w3.org/2016/05/20-wot-minutes.html <http://www.w3.org/2016/05/20-wot-minutes.html>

[1] https://www.iotivity.org
[2] http://openconnectivity.org
[3] https://www.w3.org/2016/09/TPAC/ <https://www.w3.org/2016/09/TPAC/>

—
   Dave Raggett <dsr@w3.org <mailto:dsr@w3.org>>