Presence@FER: An ecosystem for rich presence

Presence information — expressing user willingness and ability to communicate with other users across a set of devices and tools — represents an essential prerequisite for real-time communications. Although presence-related protocols have primarily emerged in conjunction with instant messaging systems, presence is today viewed as a primer service offered by contemporary unified communication platforms, and is often referred to as the dial tone of the 21st century. The paper presents Presence@FER, an ecosystem for presence based on the Rich Presence Information Data format (RPID) which comprises both XMPP and SIP-based solutions for presence. Presence@FER supports context-aware collection and exposure of rich presence information, and offers fine-grained filtering of presence information in accordance with user context and predefined policies. It consolidates virtual, physical, and online presence into a single rich-presence platform which relies on content-based publish/subscribe service for efficient filtering and dissemination of presence information. We show a number of applications that can be built of top of such rich-presence platform, and provide details of our prototype implementation.