W3C Web of Things
A set of W3C standards that describe IoT devices with a machine-readable Thing Description so applications can discover and interact with them regardless of protocol.
The Web of Things work at the W3C does not define a new protocol. Instead, it defines a Thing Description: a JSON document, based on JSON-LD, that lists a device’s properties, actions and events and tells a client how to reach each one, whether over HTTP, CoAP, MQTT or another binding. A client that understands Thing Descriptions can work with a device it has never seen before.
For integrators the appeal is interoperability across existing protocols without replacing them, and semantic annotations that link a property to a shared vocabulary. The limit is that the standard describes interfaces rather than guaranteeing behavior, so two devices can be described correctly and still differ in what their values mean. It complements REST APIs rather than competing with device standards such as Matter.
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