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An Extensible Markup Language (XML) Configuration Access Protocol (XCAP) Usage for Manipulating Presence Document Contents
RFC 4827

Document Type RFC - Proposed Standard (May 2007) Errata
Authors Markus Isomaki , Eva Leppanen
Last updated 2020-01-21
RFC stream Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF)
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IESG Responsible AD Ted Hardie
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RFC 4827
Network Working Group                                         M. Isomaki
Request for Comments: 4827                                   E. Leppanen
Category: Standards Track                                          Nokia
                                                                May 2007

An Extensible Markup Language (XML) Configuration Access Protocol (XCAP)
           Usage for Manipulating Presence Document Contents

Status of This Memo

   This document specifies an Internet standards track protocol for the
   Internet community, and requests discussion and suggestions for
   improvements.  Please refer to the current edition of the "Internet
   Official Protocol Standards" (STD 1) for the standardization state
   and status of this protocol.  Distribution of this memo is unlimited.

Copyright Notice

   Copyright (C) The IETF Trust (2007).

Abstract

   This document describes a usage of the Extensible Markup Language
   (XML) Configuration Access Protocol (XCAP) for manipulating the
   contents of Presence Information Data Format (PIDF) based presence
   documents.  It is intended to be used in Session Initiation Protocol
   (SIP) based presence systems, where the Event State Compositor can
   use the XCAP-manipulated presence document as one of the inputs on
   which it builds the overall presence state for the presentity.

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RFC 4827        XCAP for Manipulating Presence Document         May 2007

Table of Contents

   1.  Introduction  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
   2.  Conventions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
   3.  Relationship with Presence State Published Using SIP
       PUBLISH . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
   4.  Application Usage ID  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
   5.  MIME Type . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
   6.  Structure of Manipulated Presence Information . . . . . . . . . 6
   7.  Additional Constraints  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
   8.  Resource Interdependencies  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
   9.  Naming Conventions  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
   10. Authorization Policies  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
   11. Example . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
   12. Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
   13. IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
     13.1.  XCAP Application Usage ID  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
   14. Acknowledgements  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
   15. References  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
     15.1.  Normative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
     15.2.  Informative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9

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1.  Introduction

   The Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) for Instant Messaging and
   Presence (SIMPLE) specifications allow a user, called a watcher, to
   subscribe to another user, called a presentity, in order to learn its
   presence information [7].  The presence data model has been specified
   in [10].  The data model makes a clean separation between person-,
   service-, and device-related information.

   A SIP-based mechanism, SIP PUBLISH method, has been defined for
   publishing presence state [4].  Using SIP PUBLISH, a Presence User
   Agent (PUA) can publish its view of the presence state, independently
   of and without the need to learn about the states set by other PUAs.
   However, SIP PUBLISH has a limited scope and does not address all the
   requirements for setting presence state.  The main issue is that SIP
   PUBLISH creates a soft state that expires after the negotiated
   lifetime unless it is refreshed.  This makes it unsuitable for cases
   where the state should prevail without active devices capable of
   refreshing the state.

   There are three main use cases where setting of permanent presence
   state that is independent of activeness of any particular device is
   useful.  The first case concerns setting person-related state.  The
   presentity would often like to set its presence state even for
   periods when it has no active devices capable of publishing
   available.  Good examples are traveling, vacations, and so on.  The
   second case is about setting state for services that are open for
   communication, even if the presentity does not have a device running
   that service online.  Examples of these kinds of services include
   e-mail, Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS), and Short Message Service
   (SMS).  In these services, the presentity is provisioned with a
   server that makes the service persistently available, at least in
   certain forms, and it would be good to be able to advertise this to
   the watchers.  Since it is not realistic to assume that all e-mail,
   MMS, or SMS servers can publish presence state on their own (and even
   if this were possible, such state would almost never change), this
   has to be done by some other device.  And since the availability of
   the service is not dependent on that device, it would be impractical
   to require that device to be constantly active just to publish such
   availability.  The third case concerns setting the default state of
   any person, service, or device in the absence of any device capable
   of actively publishing such state.  For instance, the presentity
   might want to advertise that his or her voice service is currently
   closed, just to let the watchers know that such service might be open
   at some point.  Again, this type of default state is independent of
   any particular device and can be considered rather persistent.

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   Even though SIP PUBLISH remains the main way of publishing presence
   state in SIMPLE-based presence systems and is especially well-suited
   for publishing dynamic state (which presence mainly is), it needs to
   be complemented by the mechanism described in this document to
   address the use cases presented above.

   XML Configuration Access Protocol (XCAP) [2] allows a client to read,
   write, and modify application configuration data stored in XML format
   on a server.  The data has no expiration time, so it must be
   explicitly inserted and deleted.  The protocol allows multiple
   clients to manipulate the data, provided that they are authorized to
   do so.  XCAP is already used in SIMPLE-based presence systems for
   manipulation of presence lists and presence authorization policies.
   This makes XCAP an ideal choice for doing device-independent presence
   document manipulation.

   This document defines an XML Configuration Access Protocol (XCAP)
   application usage for manipulating the contents of presence document.
   Presence Information Document Format (PIDF) [3] is used as the
   presence document format, since the event state compositor already
   has to support it, as it is used in SIP PUBLISH.

   Section 3 describes in detail how the presence document manipulated
   with XCAP is related to soft state publishing done with SIP PUBLISH.

   XCAP requires application usages to standardize several pieces of
   information, including a unique application usage ID (AUID) and an
   XML schema for the manipulated data.  These are specified starting
   from Section 4.

2.  Conventions

   In this document, the key words 'MUST', 'MUST NOT', 'REQUIRED',
   'SHALL', 'SHALL NOT', 'SHOULD', 'SHOULD NOT', 'RECOMMENDED', 'MAY',
   and 'OPTIONAL' are to be interpreted as described in RFC 2119 [1] and
   indicate requirement levels for compliant implementations.

   Comprehensive terminology of presence and event state publishing is
   provided in "Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) Extension for Event
   State Publication" [4].

3.  Relationship with Presence State Published Using SIP PUBLISH

   The framework for publishing presence state is described in Figure 1.
   A central part of the framework is the event state compositor
   element, whose function is to compose presence information received
   from several sources into a single coherent presence document.

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   The presence state manipulated with XCAP can be seen as one of the
   information sources for the compositor to be combined with the soft
   state information published using SIP PUBLISH.  This is illustrated
   in Figure 1.  It is expected that, in the normal case, there can be
   several PUAs publishing their separate views with SIP PUBLISH, but
   only a single XCAP manipulated presence document.  As shown in the
   figure, multiple XCAP clients (for instance, in different physical
   devices) can manipulate the same document on the XCAP server, but
   this still creates only one input to the event state compositor.  The
   XCAP server stores the XCAP manipulated presence document under the
   "users" tree in the XCAP document hierarchy.  See Section 9 for
   details and Section 11 for an example.

   As individual inputs, the presence states set by XCAP and SIP PUBLISH
   are completely separated, and it is not possible to directly
   manipulate the state set by one mechanism with the other.  How the
   compositor treats XCAP-based inputs with respect to SIP PUBLISH-based
   inputs is a matter of compositor policy, which is beyond the scope of
   this specification.  Since the SIP PUBLISH specification already
   mandates the compositor to be able to construct the overall presence
   state from multiple inputs, which may contain non-orthogonal (or in
   some ways even conflicting) information, this XCAP usage does not
   impose any new requirements on the compositor functionality.

               +---------------+         +------------+
               |   Event State |         |  Presence  |<-- SIP SUBSCRIBE
               |   Compositor  +---------+  Agent     |--> SIP NOTIFY
               |               |         |   (PA)     |
               +-------+-------+         +------------+
                 ^     ^     ^
                 |     |     |
                 |     |     |       +---------------+
        +--------+     |     +-------|  XCAP server  |
        |              |             +-------+-------+
        |              |                 ^         ^
        | SIP Publish  |                 |  XCAP   |
        |              |                 |         |
     +--+--+        +--+--+         +-------+   +-------+
     | PUA |        | PUA |         | XCAP  |   | XCAP  |
     |     |        |     |         | client|   | client|
     +-----+        +-----+         +-------+   +-------+

        Figure 1: Framework for Presence Publishing and Event State
                                Composition

   The protocol interface between XCAP server and the event state
   compositor is not specified here.

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4.  Application Usage ID

   XCAP requires application usages to define a unique application usage
   ID (AUID) in either the IETF tree or a vendor tree.  This
   specification defines the 'pidf-manipulation' AUID within the IETF
   tree, via the IANA registration in Section 13.

5.  MIME Type

   The MIME type for this application usage is 'application/pidf+xml'.

6.  Structure of Manipulated Presence Information

   The XML Schema of the presence information is defined in the Presence
   Information Data Format (PIDF) [3].  The PIDF also defines a
   mechanism for extending presence information.  See [8], [9], [11],
   and [12] for currently defined PIDF extensions and their XML Schemas.

   The namespace URI for PIDF is 'urn:ietf:params:xml:ns:pidf' which is
   also the XCAP default document namespace.

7.  Additional Constraints

   There are no constraints on the document beyond those described in
   the XML schemas (PIDF and its extensions) and in the description of
   PIDF [3].

8.  Resource Interdependencies

   There are no resource interdependencies beyond the possible
   interdependencies defined in PIDF [3] and XCAP [2] that need to be
   defined for this application usage.

9.  Naming Conventions

   The XCAP server MUST store only a single XCAP manipulated presence
   document for each user.  The presence document MUST be located under
   the "users" tree, using filename "index".  See an example in
   Section 11.

10.  Authorization Policies

   This application usage does not modify the default XCAP authorization
   policy, which allows only a user (owner) to read, write, or modify
   their own documents.  A server can allow privileged users to modify
   documents that they do not own, but the establishment and indication
   of such policies is outside the scope of this document.

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11.  Example

   The section provides an example of a presence document provided by an
   XCAP Client to an XCAP Server.  The presence document illustrates the
   situation where a (human) presentity has left for vacation, and
   before that, has set his presence information so that he is only
   available via e-mail.  In the absence of any published soft state
   information, this would be the sole input to the compositor forming
   the presence document.  The example document contains PIDF extensions
   specified in "RPID: Rich Presence Extensions to the Presence
   Information Data Format (PIDF)" [8] and "CIPID: Contact Information
   in Presence Information Data Format" [9].

   It is assumed that the presentity is a SIP user with Address-of-
   Record (AOR) sip:someone@example.com.  The XCAP root URI for
   example.com is assumed to be http://xcap.example.com.  The XCAP User
   Identifier (XUI) is assumed to be identical to the SIP AOR, according
   to XCAP recommendations.  In this case, the presence document would
   be located at http://xcap.example.com/pidf-manipulation/users/
   sip:someone@example.com/index.

   The presence document is created with the following XCAP operation:

  PUT /pidf-manipulation/users/sip:someone@example.com/index HTTP/1.1
  Host: xcap.example.com
  Content-Type: application/pidf+xml
  ...

  <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
        <presence xmlns="urn:ietf:params:xml:ns:pidf"
             xmlns:rp="urn:ietf:params:xml:ns:pidf:rpid"
             xmlns:dm="urn:ietf:params:xml:ns:pidf:data-model"
             xmlns:ci="urn:ietf:params:xml:ns:pidf:cipid"
             entity="sip:someone@example.com">

          <tuple id="x8eg92m">
            <status>
              <basic>closed</basic>
            </status>
            <rp:user-input>idle</rp:user-input>
            <rp:class>auth-1</rp:class>
            <contact priority="0.5">sip:user@example.com</contact>
            <note>I'm available only by e-mail.</note>
            <timestamp>2004-02-06T16:49:29Z</timestamp>
          </tuple>

          <tuple id="x8eg92n">
            <status>

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              <basic>open</basic>
            </status>
            <rp:class>auth-1</rp:class>
            <contact priority="1.0">mailto:someone@example.com</contact>
            <note>I'm reading mail a couple of times a week</note>
          </tuple>

          <dm:person id="p1">
             <rp:class>auth-A</rp:class>
             <ci:homepage>http://www.example.com/~someone</ci:homepage>
             <rp:activities>
                 <rp:vacation/>
             </rp:activities>
          </dm:person>

        </presence>

  When the user wants to change the note related to e-mail service,
  it is done with the following XCAP operation:

  PUT /pidf-manipulation/users/sip:someone@example.com/index/
  ~~/presence/tuple%5b@id='x8eg92n'%5d/note HTTP/1.1
  If-Match: "xyz"
  Host: xcap.example.com
  Content-Type: application/xcap-el+xml
  ...

  <note>I'm reading mails on Tuesdays and Fridays</note>

12.  Security Considerations

   A presence document may contain information that is highly sensitive.
   Its delivery to watchers needs to happen strictly according to the
   relevant authorization policies.  It is also important that only
   authorized clients are able to manipulate the presence information.

   The XCAP base specification mandates that all XCAP servers MUST
   implement HTTP Digest authentication specified in RFC 2617 [5].
   Furthermore, XCAP servers MUST implement HTTP over TLS [6].  It is
   recommended that administrators of XCAP servers use an HTTPS URI as
   the XCAP root services' URI, so that the digest client authentication
   occurs over TLS.  By using these means, XCAP client and server can
   ensure the confidentiality and integrity of the XCAP presence
   document manipulation operations, and that only authorized clients
   are allowed to perform them.

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13.  IANA Considerations

   There is an IANA consideration associated with this specification.

13.1.  XCAP Application Usage ID

   This section registers a new XCAP Application Usage ID (AUID)
   according to the IANA procedures defined in [2].

   Name of the AUID: pidf-manipulation

   Description: Pidf-manipulation application usage defines how XCAP is
   used to manipulate the contents of PIDF-based presence documents.

14.  Acknowledgements

   The authors would like to thank Jari Urpalainen, Jonathan Rosenberg,
   Hisham Khartabil, Aki Niemi, Mikko Lonnfors, Oliver Biot, Alex Audu,
   Krisztian Kiss, Jose Costa-Requena, George Foti, and Paul Kyzivat for
   their comments.

15.  References

15.1.  Normative References

   [1]   Bradner, S., "Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate Requirement
         Levels", BCP 14, RFC 2119, March 1997.

   [2]   Rosenberg, J., "The Extensible Markup Language (XML)
         Configuration Access Protocol (XCAP)", RFC 4825, May 2007.

   [3]   Sugano, H., Fujimoto, S., Klyne, G., Bateman, A., Carr, W., and
         J. Peterson, "Presence Information Data Format (PIDF)",
         RFC 3863, August 2004.

   [4]   Niemi, A., "Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) Extension for
         Event State Publication", RFC 3903, October 2004.

   [5]   Franks, J., "HTTP Authentication: Basic and Digest Access
         Authentication", RFC 2617, June 1999.

   [6]   Rescorla, E., "HTTP Over TLS", RFC 2818, May 2000.

15.2.  Informative References

   [7]   Rosenberg, J., "A Presence Event Package for the Session
         Initiation Protocol (SIP)", RFC 3856, August 2004.

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RFC 4827        XCAP for Manipulating Presence Document         May 2007

   [8]   Schulzrinne, H., Gurbani, V., Kyzivat, P., and J. Rosenberg,
         "RPID: Rich Presence Extensions to the Presence Information
         Data Format (PIDF)", RFC 4480, July 2006.

   [9]   Schulzrinne, H., "CIPID: Contact Information for the Presence
         Information Data Format", RFC 4482, July 2006.

   [10]  Rosenberg, J., "A Data Model for Presence", RFC 4479,
         July 2006.

   [11]  Lonnfors, M. and K. Kiss, "Session Initiation Protocol (SIP)
         User Agent Capability Extension to Presence Information Data
         Format (PIDF)", Work in Progress, July 2006.

   [12]  Schulzrinne, H., "Timed Presence Extensions to the Presence
         Information Data Format (PIDF) to Indicate Status Information
         for Past and Future Time Intervals", RFC 4481, July 2006.

Authors' Addresses

   Markus Isomaki
   Nokia
   P.O. BOX 100
   00045 NOKIA GROUP
   Finland

   EMail: markus.isomaki@nokia.com

   Eva Leppanen
   Nokia
   P.O. BOX 785
   33101 Tampere
   Finland

   EMail: eva-maria.leppanen@nokia.com

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RFC 4827        XCAP for Manipulating Presence Document         May 2007

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Acknowledgement

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   Internet Society.

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