Patent Application
20050228895
1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a methods and systems for presence information retrieval.
2. Description of the Related Art
Web services (also called application services) are services that typically include a combination of programming and data made available from a business' Web server for Web users or other Web-connected programs. Providers of Web services are generally known as application service providers. Web services range from such major services as storage management and customer relationship management (CRM) down to much more limited services such as the provision of a stock quote, the checking of bids for an auction item or a weather forecast. Web Services are typically published in a central public repository, such as UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery and Integration), where they are dynamically found and bound by the service users.
Services previously possible only with the older standardized service known as Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) are likely to become Web services. Besides the standardization and wide availability to users and businesses of the Internet itself, Web services are also increasingly enabled by the use of the Extensible Mark-up Language (XML) as a means of standardizing data formats for exchanging data. XML, a formal recommendation of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), is the foundation for the Web Services Description Language (WSDL), and is a flexible way to create common information formats and share both format and data on the World Wide Web, intranets, and elsewhere. For example, computer makers might agree on a standard or common way to describe the information about a computer product (processor speed, memory size, and so forth) and then describe the product information format with XML. Such a standard way of describing data would enable a user to send an intelligent agent (a program) to each computer makers Web site, gather data, and then make a valid comparison. XML can be used by any individual, group of individuals, or companies that want to share information in a consistent way.
One of the most promising web services is Presence, which constitutes a key enabler for mobile applications. Presence information is becoming a natural part of many interesting services such as chat, presence enhanced phonebook, Push-to-Talk (PTT), etc. Presence enriches the communication experience for the user, who becomes able to know how and when a friend or colleague can be reached before taking contact. With Presence, the user can build personal contact lists and immediately see who is online. Presence may further allow services and applications, such as for example advertisement broadcast and news updates, to better target audience that is online, thus improving the efficiency of resources allocation within a given network while increasing service revenues for the operator. Conclusively, Presence provides key operator benefits, among which are new business opportunities and increased chargeable traffic through call completion driven by the presence functionality. Likewise, Presence is also foreseen as beneficial for the end-user, providing the subscribers the ability to see how and when friends or colleagues are available before communicating, and to share interest, mood, location and content with others.
The basic concept about Presence technology is to allow entities (fixed and mobile terminals) to disseminate and consume presence information such as for example presence status, communication means, priorities, preferences, terminal capability, willingness to communicate, location and others. Depending on the usage made of presence information, there are two different entities: first, the presence entity, herein also called the presentity, is the terminal that publishes presence information related to itself. An example of presence information being published by or on behalf of the presentity, may be:
The other entity in Presence is the watcher, which is the consumer of presence information relative to a watched, or monitored presentity. A watcher may subscribe with a Presence server for presence information related to one or more presentities, and is notified of the presence information of these presentities.
In order to implement Presence, the Instant Messaging and Presence Protocol (IMPP) working group (WG) of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has been formed to develop an architecture and to standardize a protocol for Instant Messaging (IM) and Presence. IMPP has proposed a Presence model, Presence protocol requirements and an interoperability framework called CPIM (Common Presence and Instant Messaging). On the other hand, the SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) for Instant Messaging and Presence Leveraging Extensions (SIMPLE) working group has defined a protocol called SIMPLE for IM and Presence by extending and using the advantages of SIP. The SIMPLE protocol is compliant with the presence protocol requirements and also with CPIM, so that it can interwork with other CPIM-compliant presence protocols. SIMPLE supports both server-based and peer-to-peer based architectures. It inherits basic SIP mechanisms and capabilities, such as addressing, routing and authentication.
In the mobile (wireless) domain, the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) also works on standardization of the presence protocol and an Application Programming Interface (API) for the presence service in wireless domain. It is likely to adopt SIMPLE as a basic presence protocol and extend some of its features to fit in the 3GPP service architecture, as SIP is already adopted as a signaling protocol.
Reference is now made to
Presence service may be provided on a subscription basis, or as a punctual paid service. Any one of the end-user 106, 112, 124, and 126 may decide, at one point, to publish presence information about itself. For example the user of the laptop terminal 112 may subscribe to presence service with the presence server 100 and begin to publish presence information about itself, suing, for example a SIP Publish message 130. The message 130 may comprise an XML file containing presence information about the laptop terminal 112, as described hereinbefore. The message 130 is sent from the laptop 112 via the ISP 110 and the Internet 108 to the presence server 100, which receives the message and stores the presence information retrieved from message 130 in a presence database 140. By publishing presence information about itself, the laptop terminal 112 is considered to be a presence entity, or presentity. Another terminal, i.e. a watcher, may be interested in receiving presence information relative to terminal 112, and thus may subscribe to receive presence information related to the laptop terminal 112. For example, the user of the mobile PDA (Personal Digital Assistant) terminal 106 may desire to receive information as soon as the user of the laptop 112 becomes connected to the Internet in order to be able to send him an e-mail message and to be sure that the user of the laptop 112 receives, and is able to read the message on the spot. For this purpose, the PDA terminal 106 sends a subscription message such as for example a SIP Subscribe message 150 via the cellular network 102 and the Internet 108 to the presence server 100, which registers the interest of the PDA terminal 106 (the watcher) in receiving presence information related to the laptop terminal 112 (the presence entity). Responsive to the subscription message 150, the presence server 100 responds to the terminal 106 (the watcher) with presence information related to the presence entity 112 in message 160. The transmission 160 may be done on a punctual basis, i.e. as soon as receiving the subscribe message 150 at the presence server 100, or at periodic intervals.
Instances occur, however, when a watcher is interested in receiving presence information of more than one presence entity at a time. In such circumstances, the watcher must send one subscription message similar to the message 150 for each one of the presence entities of interest. Responsive to each such Subscribe message, the presence server 100 returns presence information related to each one of the presence entities of interest. When the number of presence entities is large, the signalling associated with requesting the presence information via multiple subscription messages, and the transmittal of presence information via corresponding plural responses becomes a substantial burden on the network resources.
Although there is no prior art solution as the one proposed hereinafter for solving the above-mentioned deficiencies, the U.S. patent application publication 2003/0110228 bears some relation with the field of the present invention. This publication teaches a collaboration workspace for multiparty problem resolution that monitors activity and presence in order to improve communication between network administrators and enhance the ability of service providers and end-users to work together to resolve issues concerning a user request or trouble tickets. Depending on the status of the user and service provider, a communication window provides communication via e-mail or instant messaging formats. However, the teaching of the publication U.S. patent application 2003/0110228 is limited to a method for joining users into multiparty communications sessions based on presence, and fails to address the issue of the manner in which the presence information is obtained for multiple presence entities at a time.
The U.S. patent application publication 2003/0041101 also bears some relation with the field of the present invention. This publication teaches a presence proxy that maintains presence information concerning a number of mobile units user agents and retains the presence information should the requesting user agent become unavailable. Further, the presence proxy provides lists of user agents about which particular user agent is interested in having presence information. The presence proxy also minimizes the number of notify messages sent to user agent. The U.S. patent application publication 2003/0041101 teaches a presence information proxy that allows a user agent of a watching entity to provide a single subscription request for a lists of presence entities, and that obtain in turn, within the same notify message, a list of presence information associated with each one of the entities.
Although the publication U.S. patent application 2003/0041101 provides for an improvement over the basic implementation of presence technology wherein presence information of one presence entity can only be requested by sending an individual subscription message, it still fails to teach a reliable manner in which presence information relative to a plurality of presence entities can be filtered down in order to properly fit the particular needs of a watcher. For example, a (commercial) watcher who may be a manager of a truck fleet, may be interested in receiving presence information related to a community of presence entities corresponding to his truck drivers. However, the fleet manager may be interested only in the presence information of truck drivers currently being located in the geographical area of Montreal, Canada. In such an instance, with the existing implementations, the watcher (the fleet manager) sends a subscription message comprising all the identities of the truck drivers' mobile terminals, and gets back the presence information of all truck drivers. From the list of the presence information received, the watcher, i.e. the fleet manager, further needs to manually identify which drivers are currently being located in Montreal, Canada. The current prior art implementations not only still waste network resources and bandwidth by transmitting much more presence information than the one actually needed by the watcher, but also puts an additional processing burden on the watcher itself for determining where, among all the received presence information, resides the presence information of actual interest.
Accordingly, it should be readily appreciated that in order to overcome the deficiencies and shortcomings of the existing solutions, it would be advantageous to have a method and system that renders the exchange of Presence information simpler and more efficient, especially when a watcher desires to receive presence information related to plural presence entities that satisfy certain criteria. The present invention provides such a method and system.
In one aspect, the present invention is a A method for obtaining presence information comprising the steps of:
In another aspect, the invention is a Web Service Gateway (WSG) for Presence, comprising:
In yet another aspect, the invention is a Presence Server comprising:
For a more detailed understanding of the invention, for further objects and advantages thereof, reference can now be made to the following description, taken in conjunction with the accompanying drawings, in which:
The innovative teachings of the present invention will be described with particular reference to various exemplary embodiments. However, it should be understood that this class of embodiments provides only a few examples of the many advantageous uses of the innovative teachings of the invention. In general, statements made in the specification of the present application do not necessarily limit any of the various claimed aspects of the present invention. Moreover, some statements may apply to some inventive features but not to others. In the drawings, like or similar elements are designated with identical reference numerals throughout the several views.
Reference is now made to
Also shown in
Any one of the end-user terminals 206, 212, 224, and 226 may decide, at one point, to publish presence information about itself. For example the user of the laptop terminal 212 may have subscribed to the presence service provided by presence server 200 and begin to publish presence information about itself, for example using a SIP Publish message 230. The Publish message 230 may be, or comprise an XML file containing presence information about the laptop terminal 212 (the presence entity), as described hereinbefore. The message 230 is sent from the laptop 212 via the ISP 210 and the Internet 208, until it reaches the WSG for presence 205, via a Publisher Interface 207. The Publisher interface 207 relays the Publish message 230 to the presence server 200, which receives the message and stores the presence information in a presence database 240. Because it has subscribed to the presence service and it publishes presence information about itself, the laptop terminal 212 is considered to be a presence entity, also called herein a presentity.
Other presence entities may also publish presence information about themselves, thus populating the presence database 240 of the presence server 200 with presence information. For the purpose of the present invention, it is assumed herein that all terminals shown in
At one point in time, a watcher may desire to retrieve presence information about a group of presentities that satisfy some particular criteria. For example, a watcher may be interested in obtaining presence information regarding a group of presentities consisting of user A (terminal 206A), user B (terminal 212B) and user C (terminal 224C). However, the watcher only wants to have presence information about those users, among the three users A, B, and C, which terminals support GPRS communications. Or alternatively, the watcher may only be interested in users which connection status is “online”. For the purpose of better understanding the present invention, it is assumed herein that the users A, B, and C have terminals 206A, 212B and 224C, and that the watcher is the user of terminal 206W. Thus, in order to get the desired presence information, the watcher 206W sends a subscription message 250, such as for example a SIP Subscribe message, requesting presence information about presence entities 206A, 212B and 224C, the message comprising the identification of the presence entities, preferably in the form of a telephone number or an email address, and a filter indicative of the criteria desired by the watcher.
Reference is now made jointly to
The present variant of the preferred embodiment of the invention provides for a WSG for presence 205, which acts as an interface to a presence server 200. Once the watcher 206W sends the subscription message 250, the message reaches the WSG for presence 205, and is handled by a Watcher Interface 209. A Presence Information Retriever module 211 may extract the identities 252, 254, and 256 of the presence entities 206A, 212B and 224C respectively from the message 250, and send to the presence server 200 individual request messages for presence 213, 215, and 217, wherein each one of these messages requests presence information relative to one of the presence entities 206A, 212B and 224C. The presence server 200 receives the requests 213, 215, and 217, retrieves the appropriate presence information for each one of the presence entities, and responds back with the presence information in messages 221, 223, and 225. The WSG for presence 205 receives the messages 221, 223, and 225 with the presence information relative to each one of the presence entities 206A, 212B and 224C. A Filtering module 231 applies in action 233 the filter 258 on the presence information received in messages 221, 223, and 225, i.e. determines which ones of the presentities 206A, 212B and 224C have a communication means that include GPRS. As a result, the filter module 231 may determine, for example, that only terminals 206A and 212B, but not terminal 224C, are GPRS-capable. In action 235, an Aggregator module 237 aggregates the presence information of terminals 206A, 212B that were determine to match the criteria set by the watcher 206W, and a presence notification message 260, such as for example a SIP Notify message, is returned to the watcher 206W containing the presence information of the matching presentities 206A and 212B.
Reference is now made jointly to
Once the watcher is provided with the identities of the presentities that correspond to its specified criteria, the watcher can take further actions, such as for example sending an advertisement message using GPRS communications to terminals 206A and 212B.
It is understood that any kind of criteria can be specified by a watcher and be used for filtering the presence information relative to a plurality of presentities, as long as the selected attributes values for filtering are supported by the given presence server, including but being not limited to one or more of the following:
For example, it is foreseeable that a commercial watcher may use a combination of criteria in order to perform a targeted advertisement campaign, and for this purpose may request presence information of only those presence entities which communications means include GPRS, which connection status is online, and which network status is online. Such a filter may have the form as follows:
FILTER (Communication means=GPRS; Connection Status−online; Network Status=online)
Reference is now made to
The watcher 206W sends a SIP Subscribe message 250 requesting presence information about user terminals 206A, 212B and 224C (the presence entities), the SIP Subscribe message comprising the identification of the presence entities, preferably in the form of a telephone number or an email address, and a filter indicative of the criteria specified by the watcher, in the same manner and for the same purpose as previously described with reference to
The second variant of the preferred embodiment of the invention provides for a presence server 300 that includes internal service logic for handling a request for presence information that necessitates filtering. Once the watcher 206W sends the Subscribe message 250, the message reaches the presence server 300, and is handled by service logic 310. A Retriever module 312 may extract the identities of the presence entities 206A, 212B and 224C from the message 250, and send to the presence database 240 individual Request messages for presence 313, 315, and 317, wherein each of these message requests presence information relative to one of the presence entities 206A, 212B and 224C. The presence database 240 receives the Requests 213, 215, and 217, retrieves the appropriate presence information for each one of the presence entities, and responds back with the presence information in messages 321, 323, and 325. The service logic 310 receives the messages 321, 323, and 325 with the presence information relative to each one of the presence entities 206A, 212B and 224C. A Filtering module 314 applies in action 333 the filter 258 (received in the Subscribe message 250) on the presence information received in messages 321, 323, and 325, i.e. determines which one of the presentities 206A, 212B and 224C match the criteria specified by the watcher, which in the present exemplary scenario amounts to determine which presentities have a communication means that include GPRS. As a result, the filter module 331 may determine, for example, that only terminals 206A and 212B, but not terminal 224C, are GPRS capable. In action 335, an Aggregator module 316 aggregates the presence information of the matching terminals 206A, 212B that were determined to correspond to the criteria set by the watcher 206W, and a SIP Notify message 260 is returned to the watcher 206W containing the presence information of the presentities 206A and 212B.
Once the watcher 206W is provided with the identities of the presentities that correspond to its desired criteria, the watcher can take further actions as described hereinbefore, such as for example sending an advertisement message using GPRS communications to terminals 206A and 212B.
With reference being further made to
FILTER (LOCATION=WEST_MONTREAL)
Upon receipt of message 250 with such a filter, the WSG for presence 205, or the presence server 300 returns presence information regarding all registered presentities that match the specified criteria, i.e. which are located in the west part of Montreal, Canada. With reference being made to the first variant of the invention of
With reference being now made to
Reference is now made to
The implementation of the presence invention within the WSG for presence and the presence server may be made using any software and/or hardware modules, or any combination thereof. For example, the WSG for presence and the presence server may be UNIX-based computer systems that run a software application implementing the present invention.
Therefore, with the present invention it becomes possible to request presence information about a plurality of presentities, to specify one or more criteria for the presentities of interest, and to get back the presence information of those presentitites that match the specified criteria.
Based upon the foregoing, it should now be apparent to those of ordinary skills in the art that the present invention provides an advantageous solution, which provides a method, WSG for presence and presence server for retrieving presence information relative to a plurality of presentities based on criteria associated with the presentities of interest. Although the system and method of the present invention have been described in particular reference to certain exemplary type of networks, it should be realized upon reference hereto that the innovative teachings contained herein are not necessarily limited thereto and may be implemented advantageously any communications networks, using various communications protocols. However, preferably, the signaling for requesting and obtaining presence information may be based on SIP and/or SIMPLE protocols. It is believed that the operation and construction of the present invention will be apparent from the foregoing description. While the method and system shown and described have been characterized as being preferred, it will be readily apparent that various changes and modifications could be made therein without departing from the scope of the invention as defined by the claims set forth hereinbelow.
Although several preferred embodiments of the method and system of the present invention have been illustrated in the accompanying Drawings and described in the foregoing Detailed Description, it will be understood that the invention is not limited to the embodiments disclosed, but is capable of numerous rearrangements, modifications and substitutions without departing from the spirit of the invention as set forth and defined by the following claims.
