Web of Things

Applying the principles of the Web to IoT devices so they become seamlessly interoperable, the same way the Web turned computers of every kind into one seamless web of information. It is a line of research started at ETH and now a W3C standardisation effort, with Dominique Guinard and Simon Mayer among the people behind it.

Why it matters to me

It sits at the perfect intersection of the three things I was already interested in — the Web, IoT, and ubiquitous computing — and unlike the vision it serves, it addressed a problem I had actually hit. I had spent a lot of time tinkering with IoT and smart home devices, and I knew interoperability was a real problem. Reading Dominique Guinard's Building the Web of Things is what made me realise the Web's principles were the answer to it.

Finding it is how I ended up in Simon Mayer's Interactions Lab at the University of St. Gallen for Learning from interactions, my first research project. I enjoyed it enough to reach out to Dominique spontaneously, which turned into an internship at his company EVRYTHNG.

After that, fro about a year, everything I was thinking about was making devices seamlessly interoperable via the Web. It ran through the second half of Omnia, where I organised the first Zurich Web of Things meetup and built ChatIoT: giving ChatGPT access to IoT devices via the Web of Things, essentially MCP for IoT before MCP existed.