Contextualization as an independent abstraction mechanism for conceptual modeling

Abstract

The notion of context appears in computer science, as well as in several other disciplines, in various forms. In this paper, we present a general framework for representing the notion of context in information modeling. First, we define a context as a set of objects, within which each object has a set of names and possibly a reference: the reference of the object is another context which "hides" detailed information about the object. Then, we introduce the possibility of structuring the contents of a context through the traditional abstraction mechanisms, i.e. classification, generalization, and attribution. We show that, depending on the application, our notion of context can be used as an independent abstraction mechanism, either in an alternative or a complementary capacity with respect to the traditional abstraction mechanisms. We also study the interactions between contextualization and the traditional abstraction mechanisms, as well as the constraints that govern such interactions. Finally, we present a theory for contextualized information bases. The theory includes a set of validity constraints, a model theory, as well as a set of sound and complete inference rules. We show that our core theory can be easily extended to support embedding of particular information models in our contextualization framework.

Contextual Healing: Privacy through Interpretation Management

“…The interpretation captures the meaning or the message, as well as the sensitivity of a data item [12]. A data item can have a limited set of possible interpretations.…”

An ontological modelling of user requirements for personalised information provision

“…Ontologies can provide a means for contextual conceptualisation of the domain knowledge and facilitate the representation of users' needs. A context in an information base can be seen as a higher-order conceptual entity that groups together other conceptual entities on which we want to focus (Analyti et al 2007;Guarino 1995).…”

Towards engineering models of aspectual pervasive software services

“…The notion of context used in this paper is based on a definition provided by Analyti et al [3] for context in information modeling. The authors in [3] describe context as a set of objects, each of which is associated with a set of names and another context called its reference.…”

“…The authors in [3] describe context as a set of objects, each of which is associated with a set of names and another context called its reference. Furthermore, the authors enhance the definition for context by stating that each object of a context is either a simple object or a link object (attribute, instance-of, ISA) and each object can be related to other objects through attribute, instance-of or ISA links.…”