W3C Web of Things Interest Group meeting in Sapporo, Japan

The Web of Things Interest Group met in Sapporo, Japan on 29-30 October 2015 as part of W3C’s annual week of meetings (TPAC). We listened to status reports and plans for each of the four existing task forces: Thing Descriptions, APIs & Protocols, Discovery & Privacy, and Security, Privacy and Resilience. These task forces are conducting technology landscape surveys and plan to publish these as Interest Group reports early in 2016. TPAC provided a great opportunity for an exchange of ideas across W3C groups. Tobi Langel talked to us about the work of the Device APIs WG on the Generic Sensor API. We also had joint sessions with the Automotive IG and new Spatial Data on the Web WG. We heard ideas from the MozOpenHard Project on browser APIs for access to low level capabilities (WebGPIO and WebI2C). Fraunhofer FOKUS presented work on a discovery API inspired by the Presentation API. RWE talked about discovery, configuration and working of Lemonbeat-Devices. Samsung introduced their “Things Web”.

A high point of the meeting was the plugfest. We had some 8 implementations, many of which focused on the RGB lamp use case that was agreed in advance. We want to hold another plugfest at our next face to face in January 2016, where we plan to cover security capabilities. After an evening dinner at the Sapporo Beer Garden, we continued the next day with a summary of the results of the plugfest, followed by break out sessions for each of the task forces. We also agreed to launch a new task force to focus on communications and outreach, including collaborations with IoT industry alliances and standards development organisations. We’re continuing to work on plans for chartering a W3C Web of Things Working Group in 2016.

Several of us then traveled on to Yokohama for a joint W3C Web of Things IG and the IRTF Thing to Thing Research Group meeting. There we discussed the aims of the T2TRG which is about to get a charter, and we split into task forces, one focusing on boot strapping security for IoT devices, and the other on REST and a study by Ari Keränen on RESTful design for the IoT. There was enthusiasm for continued dialogue between the WoT IG and the T2TRG, and we will now explore opportunities for joint plugfests in 2016.