LONDON & NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--The Internet of Things has reached a significant milestone towards establishing industry standards. EVRYTHNG, the Internet of Things (IoT) software pioneer and smart products cloud platform, has submitted important new guidelines to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The core of EVRYTHNG’s submission is the creation of a unifying global ‘Web of Things’ standard at a critical time in IoT’s development. The proposal vastly simplifies IoT, by making it easy for anyone to connect IoT products, devices, services, and applications to the Web so they can talk to each other. The recommendations are based on three years of work alongside organizations like W3C, IBM and the Barcelona Supercomputing Center for European COMPOSE research.
The Emerging Land Grab for IoT Standardization
How the world standardizes the World Wide Web for the revolutionary wave of technologies driving the IoT forward is being decided right now, and the battle lines being drawn are often shaped by individual commercial agendas which inhibit the creation of a universal, public resource. The technical detail about how physical things talk to each other over the Web will make a massive difference about whether or not the IoT realizes its true vision, or becomes a complex mesh of proprietary or semi-proprietary standards.
EVRYTHNG’s Advocacy for Open Standards Drives Efficient and Sustainable IoT Interoperability
In response to today’s fast-paced movement towards standardization, EVRYTHNG holds the position that because the open Web has always been the essential global platform for connecting information, people and applications, the Web should now be the platform for connecting physical things too. From an engineering standpoint, EVRYTHNG’s platform has always been based on this ‘Web of Things’ philosophy: a physical Web of objects, devices, platforms and applications that work together using open Web standards. Webofthings.org is the company’s community for developers, researchers, and designers exploring this future.
Driving the movement towards openness and convergence are EVRYTHNG’s Dominique Guinard, Co-founder & Chief Technical Officer, and Vlad Trifa, Co-founder & Executive Vice President of Research and Development. Both members of the Web of Things Interest Group (IG), Guinard and Trifa have dedicated their skills and insight to realizing the W3C vision of One Web.
Under Guinard and Trifa’s leadership, highlights of EVRYTHNG’s proposal to the W3C includes:
1. Network and transport protocol independence. The proposal does not require the use of a given networking protocol (e.g., Zigbee, Bluetooth) but rather focuses on an Application Layer for the IoT that abstracts the specifics of different networking protocols, therefore fostering interoperability.
2. Advocating the use of Web protocols. As previously described, core to EVRYTHNG’s position is leveraging web-based protocols such HTTP, WebSockets and JSON as the critical building blocks for the future application layer of the IoT. In this submission, EVRYTHNG proposes comprehensive recommendations on standards that can be implemented to make this a reality.
3. Defining an open and simple framework that models physical objects and their interactions. As more physical objects become smart, the industry will increasingly benefit from a global, universal language. EVRYTHNG’s submission outlines a formal structure for defining physical products, as well as provides a framework that stakeholders across the ecosystem can use to allow smart products to efficiently and effectively interact with each other.
Guinard explained: “The architecture of the IoT is currently a complex labyrinth of fragmented standards and alliances. This makes neutral institutions such as the W3C vital to ensure that no single, commercial interest dominates the space. Universal standards are essential; not only to provide a fair marketplace, but also to help the IoT achieve its full potential. By operating in silos, devices are making it much harder to work together to deliver a coherent, valuable user experience. This is why EVRYTHNG has proposed an entirely Web standards based approach.”
Trifa added: “The adoption of a simple and uniform taxonomy that provides a set way of describing Things would enable all applications to discover and communicate with a myriad of things without the need for individual custom codes. Standardization would mean an IoT without barriers where anything is possible.”
To find out more about EVRYTHNG’s specific recommendations to W3C and its vision for the future of a less restricted IoT, view the submission document at: http://www.w3.org/Submission/.
This news first appeared on O’Reilly Radar.
About EVRYTHNG
EVRYTHNG is the Internet of Things Smart Products Platform connecting consumer products to the Web, and managing real-time data to drive applications. The world’s leading consumer product manufacturers work with EVRYTHNG to manage billions of intelligent online identities in the cloud for their products, deliver real-time interactive experiences and support services to consumers, and connect with the ecosystem of other applications and products in their digital lives. To find out more about how EVRYTHNG’s award-winning IoT cloud platform delivers better consumer-product experiences and smarter product operations, please visit evrythng.com and follow @EVRYTHNG.
