History of the Web of Things at the W3C

Web of Things has reached its place at W3C after many years of discussions and work by different parties. The work has started as a discussion by the creation of the WoT Community Group in 2013. It became quickly clear that there is a lot of interest in the Web of Things and the first W3C WoT workshop was organized in Berlin, Germany in June 2014, where more than 100 people have participated and expressed their interests and positions.

Quickly after that, at the annual W3C TPAC in November 2014, in Silicon Valley, California, the next steps for the Web of Things were discussed and an Interest Group was formed with the aim to identify use cases and requirements for web standards to enable open markets of services that build on top of the Internet of Things, in combination with the Web of Data.

The first Face to Face meeting of the Interest Group happened in April 2015 in Munich, Germany. The group has identified that different task forces such as Thing Description, Architecture and Scripting API were needed in order to produce corresponding deliverables. The Interest Group had the first ever WoT PlugFest in Sapporo. Companies such as Siemens, INSTITUT TELECOM (France), FOKUS, KDDI, ETRI, ACCESS, and Fujitsu verified Thing Description-based basic interoperability between participating implementations. Given the success in Sapporo, PlugFest was institutionalized in WoT IG. In virtually every Face-to-Face meeting thereafter starts with one or two days PlugFest before technical discussion days.

In December 2016, the W3C WoT Working Group has started its work with its first charter with the aim of producing 4 specifications, namely Thing Description, Architecture as normative specifications and Scripting API, Binding Templates as an informative ones. In June 2019, the groups have organized the Second WoT Workshop in Munich, Germany to celebrate the finalization of the deliverables of the charter. Indeed, the Working Group has published the promised specifications in early 2020, with WoT Thing Description and WoT Architecture being two brand new W3C Recommendations.

Since then, the Working Group is working on new specifications such as the WoT Profiles and WoT Discovery, while working on the newer versions of Thing Description, Architecture, Scripting API and Binding Templates. If you are interested in learning about WoT, check our documentation page.