System, apparatus and method for providing partial presence notifications

A computer-readable medium having instructions stored thereon which are executable by a computer system for notifying client terminals of presence information by performing steps comprising:

• (a) creating a presence document for use by at least one terminal requesting presence information regarding a presentity, comprising:
• (i) creating at least one tuple, wherein the tuple includes a version value indicating a version of the tuple relative to previous versions of the tuple;
• (ii) associating presence information with the tuple, wherein the presence information comprises a subset of the presentity's complete set of presence information;
• (b) sending the presence document to the client terminal requesting the presence information;
• (c) comparing the version value provided via the tuple to a current version value stored on the client terminal;
• and
• (d) directing the client terminal to update presence information associated with the tuple, if the version value provided via the tuple indicates new presence information is available for that tuple.

A computer data signal embodied in a carrier wave by a computing system and encoding a computer program for communicating presence information between presence servers and terminals coupled to the presence servers via a network, the computer program comprising instructions for:

• identifying at least one presentity to which a terminal has requested presence services;
• creating a presence document including presence information corresponding to the presentity;
• configuring the presence information as partial presence information comprising less than a total of the presence information available for the presentity;
• and
• communicating the presence document having the partial presence information to the terminal requesting the presence information.