On 14 September 2026, the Web of Things (WoT) Working Group rechartered, announcing the agenda for the next two years. The group plans to further improve interoperability across the Internet of Things (IoT) and address emerging use cases around physical AI.
WoT counteracts fragmentation in IoT by providing building blocks that enable seamless integration of devices and services across the IoT ecosystem. Across domains like smart buildings, industrial automation, and energy management, it eliminates proprietary silos and significantly reduces integration effort. With metadata added at the device level, semantic data quality improves across all layers, reducing the need for manual intervention downstream.
Web of Things across multiple ecosystems
WoT adopts architectural ideas and technologies from the web, which built an interoperability layer for the Internet, and applies them to IoT. Rather than proposing a new standard or protocol to replace existing ones, it creates an abstraction layer that allows different protocols and standards to work together. This enables WoT production deployments across a multitude of domains and facilitates its adoption by other standards development organizations as a foundational building block.
The new charter draws upon numerous requests from adopters as well as insights gathered from hands-on interoperability testing events called Plugfests, that the Web of Things community holds regularly. As a result, the new charter focuses on increasing the expressiveness of the Thing Description standard. Additionally, new protocol bindings will be introduced, accompanied by a registry governing supported protocols.
How AI agents can interact with the physical world via Thing Descriptions
The WG will also create developer guidance for designing WoT-based applications, including best practices, tooling, and examples. This includes explaining how AI agents discover, safely sense, and act on the physical world via devices described with Thing Descriptions. These resources will be shared via the WoT website and social media channels, and further validated during Plugfests.
Watch the summary (00:02:49) of the last year’s work across multiple Web of Things groups at W3C
The first face-to-face meeting of the group will take place at W3C TPAC 2026 in Dublin, Ireland, from 26 to 30 October. Alongside a three-day Plugfest, the schedule includes joint meetings with other W3C groups and regular standardization sessions. See the WoT program.
Different places to discover the Web of Things community and their work
You can meet the WoT WG and community in Dublin or engage online across multiple channels, such as the Discord server hosted by the WoT Community Group (CG). Additionally, the W3C WoT Open Day and WoT Hands-on event in Shenzhen, China, on 14-15 January 2027 will offer a similar experience with a strong presence from regional organizations.
Join the WoT Working Group and the WoT Community Group.
Testimonials from W3C Members
Conexxus
Conexxus, the preeminent provider of interface standards for the convenience retail industry, is using W3C Web of Things (WoT) technology to close the gap between cloud services and in-store devices. In addition to cloud services, convenience retailers must connect to a growing number of local devices, such as food-service equipment, coolers and freezers, electronic shelf labels, digital signage, environmental controls, lighting, and pickup lockers. WoT provides a common, machine-readable way to describe what a device can do, which helps Conexxus build the device standards its retailers need.
Siemens
Siemens supports the Web of Things standards and sees them as a strategic priority. It enables us to serve our customers with integrating efficient diverse data sources from a variety of device systems. Today, it is used across on premise and cloud building management systems, as well as our ONE Connectivity solution that provides device connectivity to numerous products. With IoT data often being siloed, the level of transparency created by WoT is a game-changer for an industry seeking to optimize operations and meet sustainability targets.
Saida Kontrime, Global Head of Technology, SVP, Siemens Smart Infrastructure Buildings
Microsoft
We continue to invest in WoT technology with our active participation and contributions to the working group and have also started integrating it into our products, such as Azure IoT Operations. We also continue to support the need for cooperation and coordination with other consortia and the broader IoT ecosystem and this is why we actively chair both the WoT-Connectivity and WoT-Binding working groups within the OPC Foundation. Finally, to accelerate adoption, we continue to contribute to the open-source .Net Standard OPC UA reference stack and of course the UA Edge Translator industrial connectivity solution, both on GitHub and both deeply integrate WoT technology today.
Erich Barnstedt, Senior Director & Architect Industrial Standards, Corporate Standards Group, Microsoft Corporation