PROGRAMA DEL CURSO: DERECHOS HUMANOS

A first definition can be found in the Oxford English Dictionary, which defines context as:

The whole structure of a connected passage regarded in its bearing upon any of the parts which constitute it; the parts which immediately precede or follow any particular passage or ‘text’ and determine its meaning.

This definition is very near to the context with reference to the spoken or written language. This definition depicts the complexity of context and the fact that is structured. The parts of the structure can provide different kinds of information to understand the meaning of a passage or text. Since this definition comes from a dictionary, this description is quite general. The word context can assume very different meaning with reference to the concerned domain. For instance, in Psychology context refers to the background stimuli that accompany some kind of foreground event. For example, if a rat is foraging and is frightened by a cat, the place (and possibly time) of foraging is the context and the cat is the foreground event. There seems to be a specialized neural structure, the hippocampus, for the processing of some kinds of context. In Philosophy, the

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context gave the rise to a trend called Contextualism, which describes a collection of views in philosophy which emphasize the context in which an action, utterance, or expression occurs, and argues that, in some important respect, the action, utterance, or expression can only be understood relative to that context (Price, 2008). The same happened in art, where a German trend took that name of Context Art (Kontext Kunst in German). About Context Art, Peter Weibel wrote in (Weibel, 1994):

“It is no longer purely about critiquing the art system, but about critiquing reality and analyzing and creating social processes. In the ’90s, non-art contexts are being increasingly drawn into the art discourse. Artists are becoming autonomous agents of social processes, partisans of the real. The interaction between artists and social situations, between art and non-art contexts has led to a new art form, where both are folded together: Context art. The aim of this social construction of art is to take part in the social construction of reality.” Context became a main topic also in computer science. Already back in the 1960s. the notion of context has been modeled and exploited in many areas of computer science (Coutaz et al., 2005). The scientific community has debated definitions and uses for many years without reaching a clear consensus (Dourish, 2004). Schilit et al. provided a definition in order to adapt the notion of context- aware systems to the emerging mobile computing (Schilit et al., 1994):

“Context encompasses more than just the user’s location, because other things of interest are also mobile and changing. Context includes lighting, noise level, network connectivity, communication costs, communication bandwidth and even the social situation, e.g., whether you are with your manager or with a co- worker.”

In 2001, Dey and Abowd gave a definition of context where they introduced the concept of entities characterized by individual states (Dey et al., 2001):

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“Context: any information that can be used to characterize the situation of entities (i.e. whether a person, place or object) that are considered relevant to the interaction between a user and an application, including the user and the applications themselves. Context is typically the location, identity and state of people, groups and computational and physical objects.”

In the same year Moran and Dourish described context as physical and social situation in which computational devices are embedded (Moran & Dourish, 2001). This extension was important because it specified that the state is more than the physical status but there are many other factors linked to cultural and social conditions that can determine the meaning of an action. The most comprehensive definition of context has been given by Zimmermann et al., who wrote in (Zimmermann et al., 2007):

“Context is any information that can be used to characterize the situation of an entity. Elements for the description of this context information fall into five categories: individuality, activity, location, time, and relations. The activity predominantly determines the relevancy of context elements in specific situations, and the location and time primarily drive the creation of relations between entities and enable the exchange of context information among entities”.

This operational definition introduces the five classes that can be used to categorize the contextual information retrieved by systems. Moreover, the time category indicates how important is the description of the different entities at a certain time. In fact, context is not simply the state of a predefined entity with a fixed set of parameters. It is part of a dynamic process of interacting between the different entities with an ever-changing environment composed of reconfigurable, migratory, distributed and multi-scale resources (Coutaz et al., 2005). The aspect of dynamism of context is at the base of the distinction between the two major approaches to context information management. The two approaches for context modeling in human-computer interaction are:

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positivism and phenomenology (Dourish, 2004). Positivist design presents context as a set of features of the environment surrounding generic activities. These features are retrieved through sensors distributed in the environment, and the data are encoded and made available to a software system that can use this information as enclosure for the reasoning about the activity. With reference to this approach, context is a form of information that can be measured and represented in software. Moreover, it is possible to define what parameters count for the determination of the context in specific activities defining in advance the functions that the system supports. This leads to another relevant characteristic of the positivist approach: context and activity are considered two separate elements. The activity is a set of actions performed in a context and the context describes a set of features characterizing the environment but that are separate from the activity itself. Moreover, this set of features that describes the context is stable. Although the precise elements of a context representation might vary from application to application, they do not vary from instance to instance of an activity or an event. The determination of the relevance of any potential contextual element can be made once and for all. On the contrary, the phenomenological approach defines the context as an interactional problem, which is dynamic and its features cannot be defined in advance. In fact, the context is particular to each instance of an activity. The context is not only considered as information to be measure but is represented as a relational property that holds between objects or activities. It is not simply the case that something is or is not context; rather, it may or may not be contextually relevant to some particular activity. Finally, context and activity are not separable: context arises from the activity.