The Web of Things Working Group has published the First Public Working Draft of the Web of Things (WoT) Thing Description 2.0. This document describes a formal information model and a common representation for a Web of Things (WoT) Thing Description (TD), Version 2.0. A Thing Description describes the metadata and interfaces of Things, where a Thing is an abstraction of a physical or virtual entity that provides interactions to and participates in the Web of Things. Thing Descriptions provide a set of interactions based on a small vocabulary that makes it possible both to integrate diverse devices and to allow diverse applications to interoperate. Thing Descriptions, by default, are encoded in a JSON format that also allows JSON-LD processing. The latter provides a powerful foundation to represent knowledge about Things in a machine-understandable way. A Thing Description instance can be hosted by the Thing itself or hosted externally when a Thing has resource restrictions (e.g., limited memory space) or when a Web of Things-compatible legacy device is retrofitted with a Thing Description. Furthermore, this document introduces the Thing Model, which allows authors to describe only the model or class of an Internet of Things (IoT) entity. Thing Models can be seen as a template for Thing Description instances, but with reduced constraints such as no or few requirements for specific communication metadata.

This specification continues the work of WoT Thing Description 1.1 with no guarantees on backwards compatibility. In case of no backwards compatibility, there will be concrete guidelines for implementers to migrate to the new version.

In other updates, the Working Group has retired the Group Note for the WoT Binding Templates and replaced it with the WoT Binding Registry. Additionally, the Working Group has published an updated Working Draft for the WoT Profiles.