first you should determine context parameters.

for example if you consider time as context parameter, you can fix:

Time_para={morning, afternoon, evening, night }

and an easy way to represent this context , is to set to 1 or 0 the considered attributes.

thus if you want to specify that it is "afternoon" => Time_para={0, 1, 0, 0}

Thanks Naouar for your answer but i am looking for clear methodological approaches. Specifying the context parameters and the dimensions of context is too generic.

There are several context modeling methodologies or approaches published in the related literature. However, they have been developed to serve particular objectives. I think the objectives have to be considered as a meta-parameter at sorting context modeling methodologies. Anyway, the objective has an influence on the abstractions applied at capturing context information.

Thanks Mr. Imre. I will be very thinkfull if you guide me to some relevant papers.

Best regards

Ines

Dear Dr. Khardani,

Probably you have already come across these papers. My PhD students have found them meaningful. Kind regards,

Imre Horvath

You could have a look at the proceedings of the International and Interdisciplinary Conference on Modeling and Using Context series which are published by Springer.

Cheers

Bernd

It really depends on how you define "context." If you are looking for engineering-type approaches to modeling context, you might consider the task-oriented modeling approaches like GOMS (http://www.instructionaldesign.org/theories/goms.html) or the Issue-Based Information System (IBIS) approach to capturing and using design rationale (https://mccricks.wordpress.com/tag/gibis/).

I prefer the more human-oriented approach of Checkland's Soft Systems Analysis, which separates out perspectives (purposes) on the context of work/whatever as a set of purposeful systems of human activity. Each perspective is modeled separately, to understand the multiple "dimensions" of context, as understood by participants in the system. See http://blog.improv-design.com/soft-systems-methodology/introduction-to-ssm/  for more.

While Susan points to work on context in the usability enginering/HCI area,, there is also a huge bunch of work in formal logics on context: see e.g. https://www.unige.ch/lettres/philo/publications/engel/liberamicorum/bouchard.pdf or http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0004370203002157.

Thank you all for your answers. I found the links and references you give very useful and give a more clear vision about context modelling approaches.

Hi Ines,

I have been working in mobile context modeling. CARIM is a model that includes interaction and context information, as well as other subjective parameters that allow you to determine and analyze QoE in mobile environments, online and offline.

Click my name to find my space in ResearchGate. In my PhD you can find a chapter (6 or 7, i do not remember well) in which a list of parameters aimed at modeling the mobile context are described. There is also a paper related to CARIM, but it is under copyright. You can ask for a private copy if you need it.

Hope this helps. Any further help you need, do not hesitate to contact me.

Cheers

The question is too fuzzy for accurate answers, but here's some more ideas about context. Many of these current answers are very limited and narrow - context is a huge term that is used in numerous alternative ways. You need to be more precise what you want to achieve with context and modelling. What you mean by context and modelling. Etc.

Research about provenance is all about documenting and tracking context. This article reviews are huge amount of multi-disciplinary provenance (=contexts) research. The topic is huge.

http://jcse.kiise.org/posting/2-3/jcse_2-3_28.pdf

One clearly a methodological paper about context modelling is this: CEIP Maps: Context-embedded Information Product Map

http://mitiq.mit.edu/Documents/Publications/Papers/2007/Lee%20et%20al%20CEIP%20Maps%20AMCIS%202007.pdf

There is a lot of research about context in HCI research. The whole discipline is based on the concept of context. For example HCI ISO standard defines Context of Use as a combination of users, tasks, tools and environments. You can model these issues in unlimited level of detail and complexity. There exists a lot of managerial and technical tools for modelling contexts in user centred development processes. Software systems for modelling context as well as systems to monitor contexts. Etc.

Now I can also remember a good reference from Hannu Korhonen analyzing dimensions of context affecting user experience. There you can find some good context categorization to find out context parameters.

Hannu Korhonen, Juha Arrasvuori, and Kaisa Väänänen-Vainio-Mattila. Analysing

user experience of personal mobile products through contextual factors. In Marios C.

Angelides, Lambros Lambrinos, Michael Rohs, and Enrico Rukzio, editors, MUM,

page 11. ACM, 2010.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/221342497_Analysing_user_experience_of_personal_mobile_products_through_contextual_factors

Conference Paper Analysing user experience of personal mobile products throug...

My take on context is that you really should think about “contextualization” rather than “context”, which is a very elusive concept. Contextualization is something we as humans (and for that matter other organisms) do as a result of the phylogenetic evolution of our species. If, for example, a brain lesion in the hippocampus area makes a person unable to contextualize her environment, action is inhibited.

Since action is dependent on coordination, I believe that research about context should benefit from investigating our neurobiological endowments for coordinating actions. Contextualization is certainly one such endowment, but others are also needed. You can find an attempt in this direction at

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/261553645_The_Activity_Modalities__A-priori_Categories_of_Coordination

Abstract: A conceptualization of a-priori forms of coordination as activity modalities is proposed. Sensations in various sensory modalities are integrated by our brain into a coherent, actionable percept, structured by the processes of objectivation, contextualization, spatialization, temporalization, stabilization, and transition. This conceptualization promises to bridge neuroscientific and applied research into the coordination problem.

Conference Paper The Activity Modalities: A Priori Categories of Coordination

I found a systematic approach towards analyzing and modeling a system and its' contextual behavior in the Cognitive Engineering methodology. You can use such methods as e.g. the cognitive task or work analysis (CTA, CWA) in order to start with the human mental model of interacting with a physical and/or virtual environment. A task to be supported founds the context you are normally interested to model. I'd recommend to start with the psychological perspective:

• Crandall, B. W.; Hoffman, R. R. (2013): Cognitive Task Analysis. In John D. Lee, Alex Kirlik (Eds.): The Oxford handbook of cognitive engineering: Oxford University Press (Oxford library of psychology), pp. 229–239.
• Klein, Gary; Ross, Karol G.; Moon, Brian M.; Klein, Devorah E.; Hoffman, Robert R.; Hollnagel, Erik (2003): Macrocognition. In Intelligent Systems, IEEE 18 (3), pp. 81–85.
• Roth, E. M.; Bisantz, A. M. (2013): Cognitive Work Analysis. In John D. Lee, Alex Kirlik (Eds.): The Oxford handbook of cognitive engineering: Oxford University Press (Oxford library of psychology).

Then you have technical alternatives how to transfer your model into a machine readable form. Maybe you already know this (older) surveys on the topic of context modeling?

• Strang, Thomas; Linnhoff-Popien, Claudia (2004): A Context Modeling Survey. In : First International Workshop on Advanced Context Modelling, Reasoning And Management at UbiComp 2004. Nottingham, England, September 7, 2004. Nottingham, UK.
• Vieira, Vaninha; Tedesco, Patricia; Salgado, Ana Carolina (2011): Designing context-sensitive systems: An integrated approach. Intelligent Collaboration and Design. In Expert Systems with Applications 38 (2), pp. 1119–1138.
• Baldauf, Matthias; Dustdar, Schahram; Rosenberg, Florian (2007): A survey on context-aware systems. In Int. J. Ad Hoc Ubiquitous Comput. 2 (4), pp. 263–277. DOI: 10.1504/IJAHUC.2007.014070.

Maybe, it helps.

Cheers

You can have a look the following papers: access control-specific context/situation models.

Context model: An Ontology-Based Approach to Context-Aware Access Control for Software Services (http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-3-642-41230-1_34).

Relationship context model: RelBOSS: A Relationship-Aware Access Control Framework for Software Services (http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-3-662-45563-0_15).

Situation model: PO-SAAC: A Purpose-Oriented Situation-Aware Access Control Framework for Software Services (http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-3-319-07881-6_5).

If you are interested in context - aware UI development you should read this

http://dial.academielouvain.be/handle/boreal:151132

Click on the bottom -right link “Telecharger”

maybe these references can help you:

On modeling Context-aware social collaboration processes    DOI:10.1016/j.is.2013.05.007

A domain-specific language for Context modeling in context-aware systems    DOI:10.1016/j.jss.2013.07.008

A Survey of Context Modeling for Pervasive Cooperative Learning    DOI:10.1109/ISITAE.2007.4409367 

Extending Context models for privacy in pervasive computing environments    DOI:10.1109/PERCOMW.2005.36 

Hi Ines,

here some more references:

Kurt Sandkuhl und Hasan Koç

On the Applicability of Concepts from Variability Modelling in Capability Modelling: Experiences from a Case in Business Process Outsourcing, In Lazaros Iliadis, Michael Papazoglou und Klaus Pohl, Editor, Advanced Information Systems Engineering Workshops Band 178 aus Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, Seite 65--76. Herausgeber: Springer International Publishing, 2014 DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-07869-4\_6 , ISBN: 978-3-319-07868-7

Hasan Koç, Erik Hennig, Stefan Jastram und Christoph Starke

State of the Art in Context Modelling -- A Systematic Literature Review In Lazaros Iliadis, Michael Papazoglou und Klaus Pohl, Editor, Advanced Information Systems Engineering Workshops Band 178 aus Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing Seite 53--64.

Herausgeber: Springer International Publishing, 2014 DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-07869-4\_5 ISBN: 978-3-319-07868-7

Kurt Sandkuhl, Hasan Koç und Janis Stirna

Capability as-a-Service: Towards Context Aware Business Services Enterprise Distributed Object Computing Conference Workshops (EDOCW), 2014 18th IEEE International , Seite 324--332. 2014 DOI: DOI 10.1109/EDOCW.2014.53

Best regards,

Matthias

Very interesting thanks Matthias.

You can a have a look at this recent article on modeling context information, particularly to identify and manage "context" using formal methods: Article CIM-CSS: A Formal Modeling Approach to Context Identificatio...