Patent ID: 8060459

Claim:
A method of generating prospective availability data, the method comprising: receiving a request regarding an availability of a user for receiving a call; transmitting a message regarding the availability of the user as a response to the request; generating prospective availability data regarding the user using a processing server, including estimating the availability of the user for at least one future temporal block by applying availability rules to temporal block data for the user associated with said at least one future temporal block; and the message being generated in response to estimating that the user is available in said at least one future temporal block, wherein said estimating the availability of the user for said at least one future temporal block comprises querying at least one of a calendar of a user associated with said temporal block data and a calendar of at least one other user associated with said user to determine meetings in which said user may be involved and estimating confidence of said queried calendar by querying an estimator that monitors actual meeting information of the user associated with said queried calendar, comparing said actual meeting information with meeting information recorded in said queried calendar, and determining the proportion of accurately recorded meeting information with respect to a total amount of meeting information recorded, and giving preference to meetings associated with the queried calendar having the highest confidence when applying said availability rules.