by Angela Guess

According to a recent press release, “The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the global standards organization for the Web, has launched a new Working Group to develop initial standards for the Web of Things. The goals of the Web of Things Working Group are to counter the fragmentation of the IoT; reduce the costs of development; lessen the risks to both investors and customers; and to encourage exponential growth in the market for IoT devices and services.In advance of W3C’s presence at Mobile World Congress 2017 next week, W3C CEO Dr. Jeff Jaffe commented, ‘There are huge, transformative opportunities not only for mobile operators but for all businesses if we can overcome the fragmentation of the IoT. As stewards of the Open Web Platform, W3C is in a unique position to create the royalty-free and platform-independent standards needed to achieve this goal’.”

The release goes on, “The W3C Web of Things Working Group will develop cross-domain Linked Data vocabularies, serialization formats, and APIs. The approach builds upon W3C’s work on Linked Data as a lingua franca for comparison of data and metadata in different formats and data models. Analysis of a broad range of IoT platforms has shown the practicality of exposing things to applications as objects based upon machine interpretable descriptions of their properties, actions, events and metadata. Application platforms, at the network edge or in the cloud, provide software drivers for each class of IoT platform. The Web of Things Working Group, co-chaired by Matthias Kovatsch (Siemens), Kazuo Kajimoto (Panasonic), Michael McCool (Intel) will collaborate with a broad range of IoT alliances and standards development organizations on security and best practices for layering the Web of Things on different IoT platforms, including: the IETF, Open Connectivity Foundation, oneM2M, OPC Foundation, Industrial Internet Consortium and Plattform Industrie 4.0.”

Read more at W3.org.

Photo credit: W3C