Integrated Framework for Device and Service Descriptions in the Web of Things

The primary goal of the Web of Things (WoT) initiative is to describe Things (i.e. devices) so that they can be discovered on the Web (i.e. using search engines) and reused in applications. OpenAPI and AsyncAPI are two emerging standards for describing synchronous and asynchronous APIs respectively. The advantages of using them for devices that adhere to the paradigm of synchronous and asynchronous communication are many, most important of all is the uniformity of representation of both services and Things in applications and on the Web. This unlocks the potential to adopt WoT technologies into applications by leveraging a much wider toolkit available today for services alone. However, not all OpenAPI and AsyncAPI features are necessary to describe Things. In response to this observation, we introduce TD abstractions (i.e. templates), one for each class of methods, to allow the creation of TDs with a small set of features. We propose algorithms to instantiate Thing properties to each template and generate TDs for general-purpose devices with minimal user input. Finally, we show how a proxy service can integrate these tools and TDs into a WoT architecture. The combination of OpenAPI and AsyncAPI TDs can also be used instead of the Thing Description approach from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) which is not yet widely accepted.