Quick update: Slides from Web of Things IG meeting at W3C TPAC event + QUDT

[Dan Brickley]

Hi folks,

I gave a quick overview of schema.org to W3C's Web of Things group
meeting in Lisbon recently. There should be no huge surprises in the
slides for anyone familiar with schema.org but I figured they might be
useful to share:

Text version is here, http://webschemas.org/docs/cg/sdo-wot-tpac-2016-09.txt
A PDF is here, http://webschemas.org/docs/cg/sdo-wot-tpac-2016-09.pdf
... but the slides are essentially just text. The original google doc
slides are at https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1mkXqW7D5IvAKVdBYHatNguCKY57FH2l72Bs7R8AmWGg/edit#

I didn't have time to go into details around any of the existing ways
in which schema.org is being explored for IoT/WoT, it was more to
establish initial contact and to connect with other discussions around
W3C on the matter of WGs making normative citation to less formal
schema development activities such as (but not limited to) schema.org.

I made the point (and it seems to be reasonably uncontroversial) that
IoT/WoT is so broad in scope that it will be essential for IoT/WoT
platforms and standards to be able to plug in "non-IoT"
domain-specific descriptive vocabulary (e.g. medical/health metrics,
agriculture, geo, ...) within a principled framework.

Relatedly, the WoT group joined the W3C Spatial Web group meeting
earlier in the week as there are various points of overlap. Darko
Anicic has already shared those slides, available here:
https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-sdw-comments/2016Sep/0000.html
(the Spatial Web WG is btw also a cross-community endeavour,
undertaken jointly with the OGC (http://www.opengeospatial.org/).


Finally back on the Schema.org side of things, I wanted to note that
we're progressing towards a release candidate for v3.2 which should
include the (very basic for now) IoT subdomain previewed at
http://iot.webschemas.org/ . As additional preliminary work for IoT
I've also been in touch with Ralph Hodgson at TopQuadrant regarding
QUDT ("Quantities, Units, Dimensions and Data Types Ontologies") and
Schema.org, to explore possibility of plugging in their extensive
efforts within schema.org-based descriptions, complementing the
current (somewhat scruffy) schema.org approach to measurement. IoT is
a major motivation here, if we want to be able to convey precise
sensor measurements and device characteristics unambiguously. I'll
talk with Ralph soon and report on any developments here.

cheers,

Dan

[Dan Brickley]

I forgot to include links to the notes from the WoT IG meeting; apologies for the additional email noise.

https://www.w3.org/2016/09/22-23-wot-minutes.html#day1-item04 includes my session (Dave Raggett took pretty detailed notes) plus others that may be of interest here.

Dan

[pala.d...@gmail.com]

Regarding measurements, a rather domain-specific example is Green Button (http://www.greenbuttondata.org/developers/), dedicated to meters.

As you can see the data model is tailored to metering applications (as requested by the relative White House call-to-action), but maybe it can be useful to consider some of its features, for example:

- a measurement can have a price associated
- some measurements are "interval based", such as energy consumption. E.g. it doesn't make much sense to read a measurement of "10 kWh" from my meter, it should be referred to a consumption interval (e.g. "you consumed 10 kWh in two days")

Daniele