See also the supporting slides
So our next speaker is Sebastian Käbisch.
He's a senior key expert at Siemens Technology in Germany.
In the W3C, he's the Advisory Committee Representative for Siemens.
He's also the co-chair of the Web of Things Working Group and Interest Group.
And the Web of Things is the focus of his presentation today.
Sebastian?
Thank you very much for the introduction, Dominique.
And, and again, thank you very much for the invitation and also warm welcome from me too.
Yeah, and I'm very happy to be able to give an insight into the Web of Things activity at the W3C.
And, as you can probably imagine, Web of Things has something to do with Internet of Things or short IoT.
Well, the difference is that Web of Things focuses more on application development with web technologies for the IoT.
But, before I go into the details, I would first like to explain what those things are and what the daily challenges are with those things.
Go to the next slide.
Well, I'm pretty sure that many people have already IoT equipment at home, such as humidity sensors, smart lighting, and Alexa, and so on, right?
But such things also exist in other domains, such as in factory domains, there are robot things or measuring things such as temperature or pressure sensors, and many more.
And if we go to the building domain, you will find things like escalators, lamps, or energy sources, such as photovoltaic systems and many other things.
And if you go to city domain, then you will see street lighting or charging station for electric vehicles, or you will traffic-like things, which is then typically used for traffic management systems.
And so on, independent in which application domain you are, it can be also health care or smart home that I mentioned beginning, you will always find things that are based on sensors or actuator, right?
Well, independent of the domains, there are typical scenarios or things which you're going to do here,?
So typical, the things are engineered in that way that you are able to do smart monitoring or smart controlling of a system, or you connect your things to cloud-based services, or you apply AI tools to enable, for example, smart maintenance of your things.
And in the IoT business, these are typical application scenarios that is always expected by the customer and where they also like to spend money on.
If they like to see an installation of an IoT system and to run an application on top, it's typical the way what the customer wants to use at the end to using this distributed IoT system and using this nice application scenarios.
Unfortunately, there is a problem.
And the problem is that there is a very big effort to realize such kind of application.
And the reason for this is that the interfaces of the things differ from each other in terms of protocols, in data model, security requirements, and many more.
And for example, that one thing speaks, for example, MQTT protocol and has some XML-based data model in the background.
Then the other thing speaks an industry protocol like Bluetooth and has a more binary data model in the background.
And then you have some HTTP interface which using JSON and so on and so on.
There is, I would say, a mess in the IoT world, what belonging to the communication interfaces and what is everything behind the interface.
And this is always the situation where engineers have to work and interface on when they want to integrate the assets or the things in the application and to integrate and to use the data that are coming from the thing.
And this is typically very time-intensive and very costly.
Well, and this is where the Web of Things come into the game to change this situation.
So the idea is that Web of Things defines or specify what we call, and also explained before, this kind of building blocks and technology building blocks that are IT-friendly and we're using existing web standards.
And the reason for this is, as we know, the web is very successful in creating application very easily and providing services, orchestrate different service to each other and so on.
And you have to idea to make some similar approaches or to have the similar paradigm also for the IoT world.
And what you have to understand, we are protocol agnostic.
That means we don't prescribe which kind of protocol you have to use.
If you are independent of that, it's applicable for any kind of application domain, as I mentioned before, like factory, building, city, healthcare, and so on.
It can be used with small sensor devices, actuators, or on edge-based devices, or can be applied to cloud-based scenarios.
And, in the Web of Things, we have one key technologies, one key technology, which is a standard size device description language.
And we call it as Web of Things Thing Description.
And, in our Web of Things team consists of three co-chairs, namely the Michael McCool from Intel, Michael Koster as invited expert, and myself.
And as a team contact, we have Kaz here on board.
And to get a good understanding what the Thing Description is doing for the device, I provided here a nice example.
The Thing Description, I like to compare this as a landing page similar to webpages: We have this index HTML there, which is always the first thing what you are going to meet on the webpage.
And we have something similar for devices or for the things, namely the Thing Description.
And the Thing Description gives you a basic understanding what the interfaces offers you, what kind of protocol is used there, what kind of data is provided there, and what kind of specific you have to know to get this data?
So that you have all the protocol settings available, which can be then used to make the communication with a device.
And, coming back to this overview, what I provided before, applying the Web of Things technology here, that would be then the expectation that you have for each Thing or for each interface, then this kind of landing page or what we call Thing Description here.
And having the Thing Description, it simplifies the application development because you have a basic ground or basic understanding where to get the information, how to access to the Things.
And this has then also the base or a very big advantage that you can build your application very easily.
So we have also in Web of Things this application layer, which is called property action events, which helps you to very easy implement IoT application.
And I will also show this with a basic scripting example here.
So what you can see here, we have again, this measuring devices here, which comes with a Thing Description.
We can simple load the Thing Description in our code.
We're loading the Thing Description and having the Thing Description, we know what kind of data points we're having there.
So for example, we want to read the sensor data of total active power here.
And this is just this few lines of code just to get the values here.
And this is the very cool thing that you have now here in abstraction, which hides all the protocol specifics.
Like if you have HTTP, you don't know that which method you have to call, is it a GET or POST or whatever.
All this detail is provided by the Thing Description and you don't need any more to use it on the application level here.
And this is also very interesting for other protocol like Bluetooth and so on, where you have much more settings needed for the interaction.
And this is not needed in here.
You can really concentrate on the business logic and do some logic behind here and run some new application.
Are we doing some more?
So we have defined some architecture principles in Web of Things.
We have also a Recommendation about Web of Things discovery.
So the idea how we can find specific Thing Description, is it a RDF based store or in some distributed networks?
We have API description or specification.
We have also some binding templates approaches to specify what kind of protocols have to be described in a specific way in a Thing Description.
And of course, and what is very important, we have also some security and privacy guidelines to make your IoT system also very safe and consider also to provide privacy in an expected way.
Well, I was also asked to give an overview who is already using this technology, especially focused in Europe.
And this is what I know.
There are many more companies which are using that, but that's quite sure they're using this technology because they did some presentation on this or they're telling us that using this technology.
So there we have, for example, the SICK AG, they are doing some sensor devices.
Then we have Schaeffler.
They are active in automotive part.
Then the German Telecom.
They have the smart home equipment which is relying on Web of Things.
Then of course Siemens, we have products which is relying on Web of Things.
And Canonical is a British based company which doing, for example, this Linux based systems.
And, and many more.
Then we have also startups here which using Web of Things like Netzo and we have Vaimee which also using Web of Things for their solution.
And Krellian, this is a building or smart home scenarios solution and so on.
And what is also good to know is that existing SDOs and foundations using also or adapting the Web of Things technology.
For example, Eclipse has some projects which supporting Web of Things in projects like the Thing web node WoT implementation or the Eclipse Ditto using Web of Things.
And there's also this asset administration share activity ongoing which also has no specific sub model how it's called there which also using Web of Things there.
And then there's also the OPC UA foundation which relying on a new standard and which is also using the Web of Things Thing Description in there.
Yeah, so there's many going on and it's very nice to see that's a big adaption.
And well, and this is the last slide where you want to or if you want to have much more information about Web of Things please visit the official Web of Things webpage where you find the specification documents also a developer area where you can find some open source tools when you are interested in this and like to play around with Web of Things.
Okay, that's it.
I think spoke too much and I'm open for questions.