Related Communities
This page discusses communities related to our contextual issues and goals.
There are several important communities around context:
- Context
- Pervasive Computing - Ubiquitous Computing: they are the same whatever other people say
- Mobile Computing (?) - I may have just invented that(Sven) ;) - I think so (Phil)
- User Modeling
Boundaries and connections between the communities
There's always the problem of distinguishing User Modeling (UM) from Context. Has anybody GOOD arguments against UM guys doing context research?
I don't, I think they go together quite nicely! The context information is needed in order to know what the user's behaviour and hence a suitable model is. Arguably the line is a bit blurry from time to time. But in general I agree with Sven. (Phil)
In my (Sven) opinion, UM captures
- the user's preferences
- the user's attributes (size, eye color)
- the user's experience/knowledge (what he knows, what he doesn't)
- the user's (long-term) plans/goals
- the user's *typical* actions / ways to solve a problem / ...
- the user's mental models
Whereas, again in my opinion, Context captures
- the user's *current* situation
- the user's *current* problem
- the user's *current* actions
- the user's *current* attention/feelings/emotions
This is still a weak difference.
- why are these weak differences? I think it is a very clear line.
but I think one great differnce is
- The user's CONTEXT will changes *greatly* after some time, which is not to be supposed to happen to his USER MODEL.
-- I would add that the UM should be able to track or maybe anticipate the changes. OR the change in context should trigger different part of the UM. (Phil)
- The user's CONTEXT will have no real use without an application reacting sensitively to the context.
- Depending on the context-sensitive application, the user's CONTEXT may be represented in a different way.
-- Agree.
Looking at the line of argument and your last comment, I think the argument should not be between context and UMs, but between context-aware systems and UMs. From what I understand by UM it covers context-aware sytems, i.e. systems adapting to context, context prediction, plus many more.
??? Feedback ??? - waiting for your response :-)
