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
• Mobile Computing (?) - I may have just invented that(Sven) ;)
• 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?

On my 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 on 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, 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.

• The user's CONTEXT will has 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.

??? Feedback ???