Context Awareness - Qualities of Context

Qualities of Context

It is common sense to understand that context awareness did not originate in computer science or the organizational learning literature (management literature). The word "context" stems from a study of human "text"; and the idea of "situated cognition," that context changes the interpretation of text, is an idea that goes back many thousand years. One of many example of recorded ancient analysis of context and interpretation is the writings of the Legalist school of philosophers, who were influential between 500-60 B.C. in China. In Western philosophy, one could easily identify ideas about "context awareness" from Greek epistemology. A search for the words "situated learning" will show that the study of context awareness goes back at least as early as Charles Pierce and other American pragmatics. Linguistics have discussed context awareness as early as the formation of the discipline.

Context defines some rules of inter-relationship of features in processing any entities as a binding clause.

Various categorizations of context have been proposed in the past. Dey and Abowd (1999) distinguish between the context types location, identity, activity and time. Kaltz et al. (2005) identified the categories user&role, process&task, location, time and device to cover a broad variety of mobile and web scenarios. They emphasize yet for these classical modalities that any optimal categorization depends very much on the application domain and use case. Beyond more advanced modalities may apply when not only single entities are addressed, but also clusters of entities that work in a coherence of context, as e.g. teams at work or also single bearers with a multiplicity of appliances.

Some classical understanding of context in business processes is derived from the definition of AAA applications with the following three categories:

• Authentication, which means i.e. confirmation of stated identity
• Authorisation, which means i.e. allowance to accrual or access to location, function, data
• Accounting, which means i.e. the relation to order context and to accounts for applied labour, granted license, and delivered goods,

these three terms including additionally location and time as stated.