Web of Things:

Lead the Web to Its Full Potential

Anyone
Anytime
Anywhere
Any Device
 Global Presence of W3C

W3C Global Hosts W3C Global Offices

Many Potential IoT Application Areas

Each Evolving Rich Capabilities!

Smart Homes Wearables Healthcare

Power & Environment Smart Cities Manufacturing

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 Web of Things

The Web of Things is a refinement of the Internet of

Things by integrating smart things not only into the
Internet (network), but into the Web Architecture
(application).
 The Internet of Things

• Still very immature, but with massive potential

• Lack of interoperability at the application level
– Data silos are holding back the potential
• Open or closed system?
– Closed systems incentive: control
– Open systems prompt: reduced costs and increased market
size
– Re-priseof “the Web”

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 Bridging the Silos

Isolated IoT products create data silos

– Vendors use fixed cloud address for devices to upload data to
– Incompatible protocols, formats and data models
Silos hinder creation of services that combine different data
– How to enable easy integration of data sources?

The Web is the framework that

offers a unifying approach:
– For simplifying application
development across many
platforms
– For metadata as a basis for
discovery, interoperability, and open
markets of services
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The IoT Standardization Challenge

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 The Web of Things
Diversity Applications

Internet of Things: Connectivity

IEEE 802.15.4 Ethernet Wi-Fi Bluetooth LoRa

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 Then, the Web!

• Web is a network of resources

– Resource is an
abstract concept
– Resource need
to be
represented,
with
multiple
approaches
– Resource can be operated
with open protocols
– URI is the unique identifier
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of a resource
 Then, the Web!
The Web is fueling a transition from costly monolithic software
to open markets of apps, with introducing Thing as another Resource

Provide
Bridges &
Resource
Interoperability
Abstractions
on the Web

Reducing Extensive
Complexity & Semantics to
Cost support
automation
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IoT vs. Web-of-Things (WoT)
  is about creating a network of objects, things, people, systems and
While IoT
applications, WoT tries to integrate them to the Web.

WoT can be thought as a flavour/option of an application layer added over the

IoT's network layer.

However, the scope of IoT applications is broader and includes systems that
are not accessible through the web (e.g., conventional WSN and RFID
systems).

From a developer's perspective, the WoT enables access and control over
IoT resources and applications using mainstream web technologies (such as
HTML 5.0, JavaScript, Ajax, PHP, Ruby n' Rails etc.).

The approach to building WoT is therefore based on RESTful principles and

REST APIs, which enable both developers and deployers to benefit from the
popularity and maturity of web technologies.
 The Web of Things architecture
• The WoT architecture stack is not composed of layers
in the strict sense, but rather of levels that add extra
functionality, as shown in the figure below.

• Each layer helps to integrate Things to the Web even

more intimately and hence making those devices more
accessible for applications and humans!
 Layer 1: Access
This layer is responsible for turning any Thing into a Web
Thing that can be interacted with using HTTP requests just
like any other resource on the Web.

In other words, a Web Thing is a REST API that allows to

interact with something in the real world, reading a
temperature sensor located across the planet.
 Layer 2: Find
Marking things accessible via an HTTP and WebSocket API is great
but it doesn’t mean applications can really “understand” what the
Thing is, what data or services it offers, and so on.

This is where the second layer – Find – becomes interesting. This

layer ensures that your Thing can not only be easily used by other
HTTP clients but can also be findable and automatically usable by
other WoT applications.

The approach here is to reuse web semantic standards to describe

things and their services. This enables searching for things through
search engines and other web indexes as well as the automatic
generation of user interfaces or tools to interact with Things
 Layer 3: Share
The Internet of Things will only blossom if Things have a
way to securely share data across services.

This is the responsibility of the Share layer, which

specifies how the data generated by Things can be shared
in an efficient and secure manner over the web.

At this level, another batch of Web protocols help. First,

TLS, the protocol that makes transactions on the Web
secure.

Then, techniques such as delegated web authentication

mechanisms like OAuth which can be integrated to our
Things’ APIs. 
 Layer 4: Compose
Finally, once Things are on the Web (layer 1) where they can be found by
humans and machines (layer 2) and their resources can be shared securely
with others (layer 3), it’s time to look at how to build large-scale, meaningful
applications for the Web of Things.

In other words, we need to understand the integration of data and services

from heterogeneous Things into an immense ecosystem of web tools such as
analytics software and mashup platforms.

Web tools at the Compose layer range from web toolkits—for example,
JavaScript SDKs offering higher-level abstractions—to dashboards with
programmable widgets, and finally to physical mashup tools such as Node-
RED as shown below.

Inspired by Web 2.0 participatory services and in particular web mashups,

physical mashups offer a unified view of the classical web and Web of Things
and empower people to build applications using data and services from Web
Things without requiring programming skills.
 WoT: Where the Web meets IoT
Diversity Applications

Web of Things
…
Internet of Things: Connectivity

IEEE 802.15.4 Ethernet Wi-Fi Bluetooth LoRa

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 Communications Stack with
A Clean Separation of Concerns
Application Scripts that define thing behaviour in terms of their
properties, actions and events, using APIs for control of
Application sensor and actuator hardware
Developer Things Software objects that hold their state
(WoT Abstract thing to thing messages
focus) Semantics and Metadata, Data
models and Data
Transfer Bindings of abstract messages to mechanisms provided by
each protocol, including choice of communication pattern,
e.g. pull, push, pub-sub, peer to peer, etc.
Platform
Developer Transport REST based protocols, e.g. HTTP, CoAP
(IoT focus) Pub-Sub protocols, e.g. MQTT, XMPP
Others, including non IP transports, e.g.
Bluetooth
Network Underlying communication technology with support for
exchange of simple messages (packets)
Many technologies designed for different requirements
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 The Web of Things: Basic Ideas at W3C
• Making life easier for application developers by
1. Leveraging the existing comm protocols
2. Providing a simple scripting model
– Things standing for physical and abstract
entities
– Things as software objects with
properties, actions and events
– Applications scripts decoupled from
underlying protocols which can be
selected according to need
– Based upon rich metadata
3. Server creates a software object (The
Thing) based upon
the thing's description
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– What properties, actions and events does
 The Things: An Abstraction

Applications act on software

objects that stand for things
– Local “things”
– Remote “things

Rich descriptions for every

“thing”
– Data models, semantics,
metadata
– Ontologies that describe
“things”

Things don’t need to be

connected Page 23 of 37 [3/9/2017]
 Metadata as key to Platform of
Platforms
• Different platforms using different technology standards,
different protocols and different data formats
• Web of Things as abstraction layer over these
platforms
• Application logic decoupled from the underlying
platforms
• Servers rely on rich metadata to communicate

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 “Semantic Web
“Semantic Web” refers to W3C's vision of the Web of
linked data. Semantic Web technologies enable people to
create data stores on the Web, build vocabularies, and
write rules for handling data. Linked data are empowered
by technologies such as RDF, SPARQL, OWL, and SKOS.
One Level Deeper on Horizontal Metadata
Core metadata applicable across application domains
Thing descriptions
• Links to thing semantics
• Data models and relationships between
things
• Dependencies and version
management
• Discovery and provisioning
• Bindings to APIs and protocols

•Security
Security practices
related metadata
Communication related • Mutual authentication
metadata • Access control
• Protocols and ports • Terms and conditions -relationship to “Liability”
• Data formats and encodings • Payments
• Multiplexing and buffering of • Trust and Identity Verification
data • Privacy and Provenance
• Efficient use of protocols •PageSafety,
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Resilience
 Thing Descriptions
Server uses URI for a thing to download its description
and create a local proxy object for use by scripts

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Thing as Agent

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 Horizontal and Vertical Metadata
Vocabularies
Industry specific groups are in best position to define
vocabularies for each vertical

W3C core metadata vocabularies used across

application domains

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 Enabled by Semantics, Metadata and
Data Models
Discovery of services
– The benefits of a lingua franca, and its limitations
Composition of services
– From different vendors for an open market of services
Monetization of services
– Support for a wide variety of models
Security, privacy, safety, compliance, trust, resilience
Scaling on multiple dimensions
– From microcontrollers to massive cloud-based server
farms

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 Referenced Architecture for WoT

Thing Images in the Cloud

Hub
WoT Servient
应用脚本

运行环境 WoT Servient

资源模型 应用脚本

协议绑定
运行环境
Thing 资源模型
Descriptio
n
协议绑定
Scripting APIs
Semantic For app
Web Access Model developers

Web Browser
WoT Servient
应用脚本
应用脚本

运行环境
运行环境
资源模型
Compatible to Thing 资源模型

协议绑定
Descriptio
existing
协议绑定

n
IoT Thing to Thing
Devices Communication
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