DRAFT Web of Things Interest Group Charter

NOTE: This draft charter has been superseded.

The mission of the Web of Things Interest Group is to accelerate the development of open markets of applications and services based upon the role of Web technologies for a combination of the Internet of Things (IoT) with the Web of data.

Join the Web of Things Interest Group . link to be added when charter is approved

End date	31 March 2016
Confidentiality	Proceedings are public
Chairs	Joerg Heuer, Siemens Ricardo Morin, Intel
Initial Team Contacts (FTE %: 10)	Dave Raggett <[email protected]>
Usual Meeting Schedule	Teleconferences: Monthly Face-to-face: Once Annually

The Internet of Things is currently beset by product silos. To unlock the commercial potential there is a need for open ecosystems based upon open standards. This includes standards for identification, discovery and interoperation of services across platforms from different vendors, and will involve the need for rich descriptions and shared data models, as well as close attention to security, privacy and accessibility. Open ecosystems will stimulate growth through the establishment of larger markets for developers and lifting the burden for tailoring products to vendor specific platforms.

This includes the potential for using scripting languages like JavaScript, data encodings such as JSON and EXI, formats for data and metadata, including Linked Data, and protocols such as HTTP and WebSockets, to name just a few examples. JavaScript could be used for direct access to IoT devices from the browser, in service platforms in the cloud or at the network edge, and for device drivers in gateways that use IoT protocols to access embeded / constrained devices, and web protocols to expose them to service platforms.

Identity is important for devices, users, applications and services, e.g. as part of end to end security and for trust management. Unlike regular web applications, we can't assume that the user is present and able to authenticate his or herself. Trust management will entail the means to verify metadata, e.g. the provenance of data, the location of a given sensor, and so forth. This is analogous to know your customer requirements in the banking world.

Applications and services often need data at a higher level than the raw data provided by sensors. Moreover, data needs to be interpreted in the context of other sources of information. The same applies to control systems whose actions need to be translated in context into actions on lower level entities. The Web of Things needs to be able to model the real world at different levels of abstraction, and to enable open markets with free competition of services across these levels. The things in the Web of Things can be considered as virtual representations of objects.

A consequence of this is that the "Things" in the Web of Things are not limited to connected devices, but can also include things that are not and cannot be connected such as people and places, and abstract ideas, such as events (e.g. a concert), organizations, and time periods (e.g. the 70s). Each thing can have one or more virtual representations (avatars). Things can also have histories, e.g. for a car, recording the sequence of previous owners. Avatars have identities, rich descriptions, services, access control and data handling policies. Avatars have URIs and are accessible via web technologies. Avatars make it easier to build applications and services that combine information from different sources and different levels of abstraction.

Scope

Note: this charter was drawn up as an outcome of the June 2014 W3C Workshop on the Web of Things.

The Web of Things Interest Group is a forum for discussion of requirements of Web technologies that enable the development of open markets of products and services based upon tags, sensors and actuators (the Internet of Things) and the Web of data. Such services can be hosted at the network edge, e.g. in home hubs, or in the cloud for increased scalability. By focusing on Web technologies for the application and service layer that overlays the IoT devices and technologies used to access them, W3C's work will complement work by other standards development organizations that focus on the Internet of Things. The aim is to identify opportunities for standards that will enable apps and services to break out of product silos.

The forum is intended to include:

organizations that commission such products and services,
designers, and developers
equipment manufacturers,
tool and platform vendors,
operators and other relevant participants in the value chain that creates and operates such products and services.

It is intended that the forum provides a focus for participants from a wide range of sectors including consumer electronics (e.g. wearables and home automation), retail, manufacturing, construction, transport, major utilities, healthcare, technology, network operators, service creation companies and marketplace hosts.

The first step for the Interest Group will be to collect and publish Web of Things use cases from these different sectors/domains and to identify common elementary use cases and requirements. This is essential for ensuring a shared understanding and will be a prerequisite for splitting work up into task forces that can then proceed in parallel. Some potential candidates for task forces include:

Survey of existing practices and standards relevant to the Web of Things
Identifying requirements for open markets of services for the Web of Things
- Data modeling
- Unique identification of things, for example using URIs
- Registration of things and the services they provide
- Service descriptions and dependencies
- Coordination and synchronization
- Real-time control and cyber-physical systems
- Discovery and trust management
- Scripting: browsers, service platforms and gateways, including APIs for IoT technologies
- Bridging the gap between the Web of Things and the IoT
- Relationship between app/service layer and network layer
- Monetization
- Provisioning and lifecycle management
Gathering requirements and techniques relating to security, privacy and accessibility for the Web of Things, e.g. strong authentication and data handling policies, as well as ensuring that services expose data in multiple formats as needed to enable accessibility
Requirements and best practices for integrating the Web of data
A study of scalability — how to support billions of users, and what is needed to enable services to dynamically adapt to changes in demand — what are the implications for standards?
Investigating the potential role of social relationships between people, places and things
Analysis of requirements for industry initiatives like Industrie 4.0 and the Industrial Internet
Coordination and outreach for different sectors/domains, and an identification of opportunities for shared data models, e.g. searchable repositories like schema.org
Collaborations with other standards development organizations

We expect that the Interest Group will choose several important application sectors/domains to focus on, so we can ensure that our open architecture has real applicability. We have not yet chosen these domains, although manufacturing appears promising.

Success Criteria

Participation via mailing list subscription and postings from people representing various stakeholder communities, including developers, equipment manufacturers, browser vendors, operators and users;
Members of the Interest Group join relevant Working Groups and drive the development of work items;
Constructive feedback on W3C deliverables posted for review on the Web of Things Interest Group mailing list.
Production of stable documents addressing the work items listed in the Deliverables section.

Out of Scope

The technical development of standards is not in the scope of the Interest Group. Instead the Interest Group will recommend work items for other groups.

Deliverables

The primary deliverables of the Web of Things Interest Group are IG notes that identify requirements for existing and/or new technical specifications, that would advance the group's mission.

In addition, the group will review and comment on documents generated by the other W3C groups and may review documents coming from external organizations.

Use Cases and Requirements for the Web of Things: This document will collect use cases from a range of application domains, and identify requirements that are shared across domains, and those that are specific to each domain.
Survey of Existing Practices and Standards Relevant to the Web of Things: This document will look at existing practices and standards, and identify opportunities for new work.
Guidelines on Best Practices: This document will identify relevant technologies and approaches to maximise interoperability across all use cases.
Requirements for Open Markets of Products and Services for the Web of Things: This document will examine what is needed to enable open markets of applications and services for the Web of Things. See Section 1.0 for some of the topics that will need to be covered.
High level architecture for the Web of Things: This document will provide a high level overview of the architectural components of the Web of Things.
End to End Security for the Web of Things: This document will look at what is needed to ensure end to end security for applications and services for the Web of Things. For instance techniques for identifying and authenticating users, devices, applications and services; techniques for ensuring confidentiality and privacy, including encryption, access control, provenance and privacy policies. This should include an examination of the potential role and security impact of social relationships between people, places and things.
Resilience for the Web of Things: This document will look at what is needed to ensure resilience of applications and services in the face of rapidly varying demand, heterogenous versions of hardware and software, hardware and software faults, and cyber attacks.

Additional deliverables may be added by the Interest Group as appropriate to explore specific topics in greater depth.

Timeline View Summary

February 2014: Initial teleconference
April 2014: First face to face meeting
July 2015: Initial publication of Use Cases and Requirements for the Web of Things, and Survey of Existing Practices and Standards Relevant to the Web of Things
October 2015: Initial publication of Requirements for Open Markets of Products and Services for the Web of Things
December 2015: Initial publication of End to End Security for the Web of Things, and Resilience for the Web of Things
Q1 2016: Draft new Working Group Charters for standardizing work items arising from the Interest Group's studies
Propose modifications to some existing WG Charters; potentially earlier than Q1 2016
Some existing WGs with existing charters; potentially much earlier than Q1 2016

Dependencies and Liaisons

W3C Groups

Technical Architecture Group: The breadth of the Web of Things is likely to raise issues that effect the Web as a whole, and when this occurs, the Web of Things Interest Group will seek the help of the Technical Architecture Group with these issues.
Automotive and Web Platform Business Group: The Web of Things Interest Group will liaise with the automotive and Web Platform Business Group in respect to role of the Web of Things for automotive applications and services.
Data Activity Coordination Group: The Web of Things Interest Group will liaise with the Data Activity Coordination Group to ensure that the use cases and requirements for the Web of Things are understood by W3C working groups developing technologies that support the automation, integration and reuse of data across applications.
Privacy Interest Group: The Web of Things Interest Group will collaborate with the Privacy Interest Group in respect to requirements and techniques for ensuring privacy for applications and services for the Web of Things.
Web Payments Interest Group: The Web of Things Interest Group will collaborate with the Web Payments Interest Group in respect to requirements for monetizing products, applications and services for the Web of Things.
Web Security Interest Group: The Web of Things Interest Group will collaborate with the Web Security Interest Group to enable end to end security of applications and services for the Web of Things.
Web Crypto Working Group: The specifications of the Web Crypto Working Group are very pertinent to the aims of the Web of Things Interest Group in respect to confidentiality and authentication.
Web App Sec Working Group: For techniques for constraining services to a minimum set of capabilities as a means to increase security through a reduction in the attack surface.
WAI Protocol and Formats Working Group: Review of accessibility perspectives for WoT, including use-cases and requirements for accessibility of WoT technologies, and examples of potentially beneficial applications of WoT technologies such as wearables, and control and sensor networks.
Data on the Web Best Practices Working Group: Focuses on developing the open data ecosystem, guidance to publishers and fostering trust in data.
Efficient XML Interchange Working Group: The Web of Things Interest Group will collaborate with the EXI Working Group in respect to requirements using EXI for resource constrained devices as part of the Web of Things.
Other relevant Working Groups: The Web of Things Interest Group will review a broad range of W3C Working Groups for APIs that are applicable to applications and services for the Web of Things.
RDF Stream Processing Community Group: The Web of Things Interest Group will collaborate with the RDF Stream Processing Community Group in respect to use cases and requirements for dealing with information streams conforming to the RDF meta-model.
Other W3C Community and Business Groups: The Web of Things Interest Group will watch for and coordinate with Community and Business Groups whose work are likely to have an impact on the the Web of Things.

External Groups

CEA: The Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) is a standards and trade organization for the consumer electronics industry in the United States, and as such will be important for integrating the Web of Things with consumer electronics devices.
GS1: GS1 produces global standards and solutions to improve the efficiency and visibility of supply and demand chains globally and across sectors. This is especially relevant to the integration of the Web of Things in the retail and manufacturing sectors.
IIC: The Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC) seeks to further development, adoption and wide-spread use of interconnected machines, intelligent analytics and people at work. This is complementary to W3C's aims to create standards that enable open markets of services for the Web of Things.
Industry 4.0: Industry 4.0 is a long term project supported by the German government to realize the potential for smart manufacturing with richer integration along the manufacturing value chain, faster time to market, and an increased focus on bespoke products tailored to each customer's need. The Web of Things Interest Group should coordinate with Industry 4.0 in respect to use cases and requirements for manufacturing.
Bluetooth SIG: The Web of Things Interest Group will liaise with the Bluetooth Special Interest Group to understand requirements for services based upon Bluetooth connections.
OASIS: OASIS is a standards development organization, and is working on standards such as MQTT that offers an efficient messaging protocol for the Web of Things.
OMG: OMG is a standards development organization, and is working on standards such as the Data Distribution Service (DDS) that offers an efficient messaging protocol for the Web of Things.
XMPP Standards Foundation (XSF): XSF is working on standards for presence, instant messaging, and real-time communication and collaboration based upon XMPP.
ETSI: The European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) produces globally-applicable standards for Information and Communications Technologies, which are likely to be an important enabler for the Web of Things.
ISO/EIC JTC 1/WG 7: This is a standardization working group that focuses on sensor networks, and coordination would help build a shared understanding, harmonization of terminology and interoperability with the Web of Things.
GSMA: The GSM Association (GSMA) represents mobile operators and develops proposals that can bring important value to the usage of the Web of Things on mobile networks.
IETF: The Internet Engineering Task Force develops the protocols that clients use to connect to the Web; ensuring these protocols match the needs of the Web of Things is an important part of achieving the group's mission. One example would be JavaScript APIs for accessing resourced constrained devices via CoAP.

Participation

Participation is open to W3C Members and invited experts. The Chairs and document Editors are expected to contribute one to two days per week towards the group. There is no minimum requirement for other Participants.

In order to make rapid progress, the group MAY form several task forces, each working on a separate topic. The group members may participate in one or more task forces.

Communication

This group conducts its substantive work on the public mailing list [email protected] and encourages non-member contributions on that list. Administrative tasks may be conducted in Member-only communications. Task forces may use separate public mailing lists to conduct their work.

Information about the group (deliverables, participants, face-to-face meetings, teleconferences, etc.) is available from the Web of Things Interest Group home page.

Decision Policy

Consistent with its mission, this group is not a decision-making body, but rather provides a forum for discussion and advice on different topics relating to its scope.

Where there is consensus among the representatives of W3C members in the group, it will be forwarded as a consensus position. Where the group does not reach agreement, the different positions (whether held by W3C members or other members of the group) will be forwarded together, with any decisions to be made by a relevant working group according to its processes.

Patent Disclosures

The Web of Things Interest Group provides an opportunity to share perspectives on the topic addressed by this charter. W3C reminds Interest Group participants of their obligation to comply with patent disclosure obligations as set out in Section 6 of the W3C Patent Policy. While the Interest Group does not produce Recommendation-track documents, when Interest Group participants review Recommendation-track specifications from Working Groups, the patent disclosure obligations do apply.

For more information about disclosure obligations for this group, please see the W3C Patent Policy Implementation.

About this Charter

This charter for the Web of Things Interest Group has been created according to section 6.2 of the Process Document. In the event of a conflict between this document or the provisions of any charter and the W3C Process, the W3C Process shall take precedence.

Charter authors: Dave Raggett

$Date: 2015/01/21 15:53:00 $