Auto merge contacts

SIP Communicator is a multi-protocol Instant Messaging(IM) and Voice over IP(VoIP) client. As for now it supports SIP, Jabber, MSN, ICQ, AIM, Yahoo, Bonjour and IRC. We could now register for example our gmail account, as well as ICQ number and yahoo email address at the same time and have all our address books gathered in one unique contact list. However when we do so, our friend John could appear 3 times in our new contact list, as John on MSN, John on Gmail and John on ICQ. So we need to merge all three contacts and indicate that this is only one person.

On the screenshot below we have merged all 4 contacts for emcho.

Unfortunately it’s not only John, most of our friends are having two or more contacts and it would take a lot of time to repeat the same merge procedure for everyone!

The purpose of this project would be to make a research, and propose algorithms on how SIP Communicator could detect such relationships by itself and automatically propose to the user a list of contacts to merge.

References:

Other SIP Communicator GSoC Projects
http://gsoc.sip-communicator.org

SIP Communicator Developer Documentation
http://www.sip-communicator.org/index.php/Documentation/DeveloperDocumentation

The official SIP Communicator website
http://www.sip-communicator.org