Overview
The Web is poised at a major threshold, and it is vital to build critical mass and momentum around open source and convergence on open standards if we are to overcome the fragmentation we see in the IoT today.
Without strong open standards, we’re likely to see competing proprietary solutions that increase the costs for implementation and limit the potential for individual developers. To avoid this, W3C’s wants to extend the Web from a Web of pages to a Web of Things. The aim is unlock data silos by bridging IoT platforms through the Web at a range of device scales from microcontrollers to cloud-based server farms.
By “things” we mean virtual objects that act as proxies for physical and abstract entities, e.g. a sensor, an actuator or a service. Each “thing” has a model that describes its metadata, events, properties and actions. This core semantics allows servers to automatically generate the corresponding objects for scripts to interact with, and avoids the need for script developers to deal with the underlying protocols. This makes it easier to build highly scalable servers which are free to use the protocols that are best suited to the requirements, as no one protocol will satisfy all needs. We will define bindings to a variety of protocols, e.g. HTTP, WebSockets, MQTT and XMPP. The bindings define how REST based messages are conveyed by each protocol to notify events and property updates, and to invoke actions and pass back their results.
Our Role:
Valbonne Consulting currently helps the W3C Web of Things Work Group bring the right people together to define a core standard for describing things, and for bindings to common protocols such as HTTP, Web Sockets, MQTT, CoAP, XMPP and AMQP.
Our clients in the embedded and Cloud domain build solutions based on Open Standards such as the W3C and ETSI M2M platform and need plenty of help with defining use-cases, manage requirements and developing software for the Web of Things, including protocols, servers and security conscious test frameworks. We are also are looking for help with servers on microcontrollers, on smart phones/tablets, and for highly scalable cloud based systems but also decentralized concepts powered by cryptocurrency and the blockchain.
Security and privacy are areas still in the early stages, where we need to better understand what’s practical. Real-time control e.g. of manufacturing robots is one of the potential application domains where the architectural considerations are especially challenging.