W3C

– DRAFT –
WoT Thing Description

02 October 2025

Attendees

Present
Daniel_Peintner, Ege_Korkan, Henk_Spaaj, Kunihiko_Toumura, Michael_Koster, Tomoaki_Mizushima, Vignesh_Vaidyanathan
Regrets
-
Chair
Ege_Korkan, Michael_Koster
Scribe
mjk

Meeting minutes

<Ege> https://www.w3.org/policies/patent-policy/20250515/

ege: (explains the W3C patent policy)

<Ege> no

<Ege> Luca is also having issues

/w3c.zoom.us/j/89964604906?pwd=bDlHMWFpeTJZeitXMDZzYkZaMXk2dz09///w3c.zoom.us/j/89964604906?pwd=bDlHMWFpeTJZeitXMDZzYkZaMXk2dz09

<Ege> can you try the zoom app

<Henk> benfrancis, I'm using the browser. Seems to work.,

<Vignesh> I agree to the patent policy

<Ege> https://www.w3.org/2003/12/22-pp-faq.html#non-participants

<Ege> https://github.com/w3c/wot-thing-description/tree/main/proposals/initial-connection

<Vignesh> Its a 404

ege: topic for today is the "Common Definitions" feature of the Thing Description format

<Ege> https://github.com/w3c/wot-thing-description/tree/main/proposals/common-definitions

Common Definitions feature of TD

ege: (explains user stories for common definitions)

ege: the problem being solved is that in the "form" element of the TD there are repeated verbose statements in each instance of the form
… The "base" element isn't sufficient for all the use cases

<Vignesh> I would say additionalResponses would also fall under same category

ege: and the semantics of interactions are not clear

<Henk> I have run into these problems in hiveot. Especially connection management and duplication of forms.

Vignesh: it would be good for example to describe error response only once

ege: agreed and noted

henk: connection management is a big problem as well as security protocol
… Also a lot of form elements don't add value
… and the problem of multiple bases

vignesh: An improvement would be really helpful for MQTT

ege: for more use cases, we can add to existing issues, cerate new issues, and update the markdown document as needed
… Requirements are to be able to reuse the common definition by linking inside the document
… there needs to be support for a global media type
… multiple base URIs
… initial connection
… also wrapper schemas for messages

dape: preprocessing for the global media type requires expanding the TD

ege: we will specify an algorithm for expansion
… we want to make sure that the simple cases are easy to describe and not burdened by the new mechanism

basic mechanism

henk: how will support for multiple protocols affect the TD?

ege: there is a default protocol
… There are inline fields and thing-wide defaults
… there are thing-wide defaults for security, connections, forms, and schemas
… (explains examples in the tooling folder)

<Henk> Ege Would it be possible to use URI variables in the default form?

<Henk> Example: {"href":"/{operation}/{name}"}

henk: the ability to use variables would eliminate the need to have form definitions

<Vignesh> operation is specified separately in the form usually right?

ege: we would need to do the mapping between the variable values and elements to substitute in the document

dape: we should be careful with this to identify problems/side effects

ege: we should open an issue

vignesh: in the last example, how do you point to 2 different forms?

ege: you can use the form name inside the form
… you can override the default for example

vignesh: OK

ege: (explains some of the recursion needed in the expansion algorithm)

ege: you can use connections inside a form

ege: you can override the security inline (example)

ege: (explains some invalid constructs)

ege: This may be over-engineered

henk: what about authorization and roles for individual affordances?

ege: it's possible today by using multiple security definitions and including them inline in the affordance

henk: it probably doesn't work for connection oriented protocols

ege: we should open an issue on this
… we might need to use a feature of the protocol
… this can be resolved in parallel with the new feature

vignesh: does nosec need to be specified?

ege: yes, the TD is invalid without it
… the security review result was we should not allow nosec as the default

vignesh: what is we have one security scheme but multiple roles?

henk: yes, this is my point too

ege: it's not clear what we need to add, we should describe it in the issue
… We are out of time now and can continue the discussion later

<Vignesh> great! I can have a look once more and get back

ege: Please let us know what additional feedback you have

<Henk> Thank you!

ege: maybe we can reconvene in 2 weeks

AOB

ege: AOB?
… none, adjourned

Minutes manually created (not a transcript), formatted by scribe.perl version 246 (Wed Oct 1 15:02:24 2025 UTC).

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Maybe present: dape, ege, henk, Vignesh

All speakers: dape, ege, henk, Vignesh

Active on IRC: dape, Ege, egekorkan, Henk, mjk, Vignesh