W3C & Web of Things at FIWARE Summit

Dave Raggett, activity lead for the Web of data, and champion for the Web of Things, presents an introduction to the Web of Things at the FIWARE Summit — FIWARE is a leading open source IoT platform.

The digitisation of industry has huge potential for boosting the agility, efficiency and competitiveness of businesses. This involves a focus on enterprise wide data management and governance, and the consequent need to tie data to its metadata. This brings together trends for enterprise knowledge graphs with the role of digital twins for physical assets. A digital twin provides a digital replica of the current state and history of such assets. Digitisation involves addressing the complexity of integrating many different systems using a wide variety of technologies and standards. W3C’s solution to this challenge is the Web of Things, an abstraction layer based upon the core architectural principles of the Web.

Things are exposed as software objects as digital twins for sensors and actuators, and which simplifies applications and services by decoupling them from the details of the underlying protocols and data formats. W3C’s framework for Linked Data is used to describe things as objects with properties, actions and events, along with semantic descriptions of things and their relationships to the context in which they are used. This enables semantic interoperability for discovery and composition of services, i.e. knowing that suppliers and consumers of services share the same meaning for the data they exchange. W3C is seeking to enable exponential growth of open markets of services by applying the core architectural principles of the Web, following in the footsteps of W3C’s earlier success with the open Web of pages, with some two billion websites in early 2018.