= Related Communities =

This page discusses communities related to our contextual issues and goals.

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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

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== 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 :-)