This talk shares insights from an on-going project coordinating data from Internet of Things (IoT) devices, and using a declarative interface to that data. REST (REpresentational State Transfer) is the architectural basis of the web. As Wikipedia points out “REST’s coordinated set of constraints, applied to the design of components in a distributed hypermedia system, can lead to a higher-performing and more maintainable software architecture.” So how can you apply the same ideas to the Internet of Things? The Internet of Things is driven by many tiny low-powered processors that produce data in a variety of different formats, and produce the data in different ways, sometimes on demand (such as thermostats), sometimes by pushing it (such as presence detectors). Traditionally, applications have to be a mash up of accesses to devices and formats. To use the data in a cohesive application, the data has to be collected and integrated; this allows very low demands to be put on the devices themselves. This project places a thin REST-layer around a diverse collection of Internet of Things devices, hiding the data-format and data-access differences, and updating the devices automatically as needed; this then allows a REST-style declarative interface to access and control the devices without having to worry about the variety of device-interfaces and formats.

The Web has turned into a programming environment, turning its back on its earlier roots of simplicity and ease-of-use. And in the process many properties of the early web have been lost. This talk will examine some of the desirable properties of a future web, such as accessibility, usability, semantics, decentralisation, privacy, aggregation and even what to do about the password problem.

Digital contracts are mechanisms to express the terms and conditions for digital content usage. Many attempts in the past have struggled with proprietary Digital Rights Management (DRM) infrastructure to assure content and rights information are transparently transacted. Digital permissions can also support Privacy and other policy assertions related to usage of digital data where no enforcement is desirable. With the emergence of HTML5 and Encrypted Media Extensions, we can envisage a truly open DRM system with digital contracts. This presentation will provide an overview of the past and present work in digital rights, and the emerging W3C permission expression language (ODRL). It will also cover the potential disruption with contract data becoming a part of the BlockChain infrastructure to support independently verifiable rights transactions.

The publishing industry uses more and more Web technologies. E-books are already based on HTML and CSS. That opens the perspective of more integration between books and the Web: Books can connect to the Web and the Web can benefit from better typography and structuring of information. But, in reality, HTML and CSS are barely enough for a simple novel. CSS needs better typographic quality and more layout capabilities.

An overview of the current and possible future activities at W3C with an emphasis on Phil Archer's particular interest of data.

Bernard Gidon will discuss the ‘Petroleum retail opportunities with the web’. Having led business development in a global context for the World Wide Web Consortium, Bernard is part of a team that develops and promotes open standards. t

XForms is a W3C standard that was originally designed to allow the specification of form-handling on the web. However, after the release of version 1.0, it was quickly realised that with a small amount of generalisation the markup could be used for more general processing and application definition. And so was born XForms 1.1. XForms has now been in use for a number of years, and is widely used on websites, but also for other applications, such as the definition of machine interfaces, the operation of submarines, for ship-building, banking and insurance, food processing, medical research, and many others. The Dutch weather service KNMI is based on XForms; several Dutch government ministries use XForms. XForms is an integral part of ODF, the Open Office Format. XForms has a number of unique properties when compared with most framework languages. Firstly it has a strict separation of data and user-interface, allowing you to specify what might be called data sheets with initial values, types, constraints and dependencies, separately from the interface. Secondly, the interface uses intent-based controls that only specify what the control is supposed to do, and not how it should achieve that. That means for instance that the same control can drive a menu, or a drop down list or radio buttons, depending on needs. This can be changed by style sheets for instance. This makes applications far more device-independent, since an application can adapt to its environment, rather than requiring the author to write different applications for different devices. Thirdly, functionality is specified declaratively rather than procedurally. This reduces the size of application significantly, and vastly reduces production times and costs (examples have shown that an order of magnitude savings can be achieved). This talk introduces the elements of XForms, and then develops a Google-maps-style application in about 100 lines of code.

In this third talk at SemWebPro in as many years, Phil Archer will describe the state of current activities at W3C related to the Semantic Web, such as Permissions and Obligations Expression, SHACL, Spatial Data on the Web Best Practices, SoLID and more, and look ahead to possible future standardisation work. For example, a current hot topic is how W3C can be better at supporting the development and management of vocabularies. What can we learn from the success of schema.org?

How the W3C and OGC are working together to create better understanding between the GIS and Web communities.

What is the role of the Web in Big Data? What are the opportunities and potential pitfalls?