What Belongs to Context?

What Belongs to Context?: A Definition, a Criterion and a Method for Deciding on What Context-Aware Systems Should Sense and Adapt to

van Engelenburg, S.H. (TU Delft Information and Communication Technology)
Janssen, M.F.W.H.A. (TU Delft Information and Communication Technology)
Klievink, A.J. (TU Delft Organisation & Governance)

Cerone, Antonio (editor)
Roveri, Marco (editor)

2018

Context-awareness refers to the ability to sense and adapt to context. With the rise of context-aware systems, designers are struggling with what variables should be sensed from the context. According to the definitions found in the literature, whether something belongs to context, has to do with whether it is relevant. However, what it means to be relevant is left implicit in these definitions. Most work on context-aware systems is based on assumptions of the context that should be taken into account. Hence, it is unclear how to decide whether something belongs to context or should be left out. In this paper, first we analyse what is meant with context and provide a definition. In this definition we introduce the notion of a context variable, defined as an attribute of an object that is relevant. Context is then defined as the set of context variables. We establish explicit criteria for deciding whether an attribute of an object is a context variable based on the proposed definition and the designer’s goal. We also provide a straightforward method to help designers to determine whether the criterion is met and a variable should be included in the context. This method is based on filling out a scheme to describe context variables.

Context-aware systems
Context
Business-to-government
Information sharing
Context variable
Context relationship

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:5af8e979-028e-40c2-acb4-2a4a59ff064b

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74781-1_8

Springer

2018-08-02

978-3-319-74780-4

Proceedings of Software Engineering and Formal Methods 2017: SEFM 2017 Collocated Workshops: DataMod, FAACS, MSE, CoSim-CPS, and FOCLASA, Trento, Italy, September 4-5, 2017, Revised Selected Papers

15th International Conference Software Engineering and Formal Methods (SEFM), 2017-09-04 → 2017-09-08, Trento, Italy

Lecture Notes in Computer Science

Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository ‘You share, we take care!’ – Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.

Institutional Repository

conference paper

© 2018 S.H. van Engelenburg, M.F.W.H.A. Janssen, A.J. Klievink