Call for Implementations: Web Thing Protocol WebSocket Sub-protocol

The W3C Web Thing Protocol Community Group is delighted to share the first draft of the Web Thing Protocol WebSocket Sub-protocol, a dedicated real-time protocol for the Web of Things.

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.

This first draft has been developed by an active community of participants, including contributors from Siemens, Deutsche Telekom, Krellian and many other interested parties. It is intended to fulfil the requirements for a WebSocket sub-protocol from our previously published Use Cases & Requirements report.

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!