Re: [Simple] Extending <status> for presence

[Henning Schulzrinne <[e-mail]>]

Stepping back a bit, maybe we should ask what kind of questions presence 
about a person can answer.

(1) Is the person available for communications and, if so, on what media?

Here, in general, we only care about the media that are available, not 
all the media that the user doesn't have right now, since that list is 
unbounded once you add applications ("No, I'm not available for Doom, 
Chess, SimCity, ..."). We might conceivably care about how long a media 
might still be available ("leaving in 15 minutes, better call quickly") 
or when it might be available again ("meeting ends in 20 minutes").

(2) What is the person doing right now?

We might want to know not just the start time (how long already), but 
also how long until anticipated completion.

Note that many calendar systems (such as RFC 2445 or Yahoo calendar) 
allow for categories of activities. Some are free-text (but often 
definable as a list for a particular software), others are pre-defined.

(3) How is the person feeling right now (calm and relaxed, stressed, 
hopping mad) - very useful to know for the calling party and easily 
derived from a real-time blood-pressure input. (:-), if that's needed.)

Obviously, there could be many other pieces of information that might be 
useful to others, such as location, level of distraction ("watching 
TV"), etc., but I suspect we all agree that those are beyond the current 
discussion.

Note that you can easily get to the point where you are effectively 
sending an iCal (or xCal draft-ietf-calsch-many-xcal-02.txt) entry 
describing the activity. This may be a better, more general solution.

Henning

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