Understanding Context

Information in hypermedia systems can be viewed as messages. When a user views a document‘s contents, the user is receiving a message. The impact this message has on the user‘s knowledge state is a result of the user‘s interpretation of the message. However, the change in knowledge state is not purely a function of the message received, otherwise everyone who received a message would interpret it the same way, and there would be no ambiguities or misunderstandings. Obviously, there is more input to the interpretation process than the message.

This “something more” is the context of the user. Context itself is a widely ambiguous term. A key researcher into the nature of context is Brenda Dervin. Dervin concludes that “there is no term that is more often used, less often defined, and when defined so variously as context”. She asks the question “What is context?” and provides a broad discussion of context in the social sciences. Some key elements relevant to hypermedia systems are the following.

1)      Knowledge is partial and temporary. When perceiving a message or an event, a receiver will only interpret as much of it as is relevant to his or her current interest. Therefore, what a receiver knows about a message or event depends on the context on which it is being received.

2)      The knower and the known are inextricably bound. Each person has a unique collection of a priori knowledge, goals and experiences that affect how a message is interpreted. Thus, what a user knows because of receiving a message depends on the nature of the user. The result of interpretation of a message is not constant. Because it depends on the knowledge, goals and experiences of the user, the interpretation will vary across users, and will even for the same user as their knowledge or goals or experiences change over time.

3)      Context is not usefully conceptualised as an independent entity It is neither meaningful, nor useful to identify an entity independent of the received message and label it as context. Context is more than just a set of related facts that alter perception of a message. Any such entity is an artificial construct that trivialises the impact of external factors on perception.

4)      Context is necessary as a source of meaning. Communication relies on common experiences and understandings in order that the interpretation of messages by sender and receiver are close enough that the ideas understood by the receiver are those generated by the sender. It is not possible to draw a neat box and put all the things that are context inside it and label the box as context. Context is not easily labelled as set of state variables associated with a message, or as a set of variables describing a user‘s state. These are possible representations of context in a system, but they are by no means the only possible, or sometimes not even the appropriate, representation.

Contextual information can come in any number of forms. For example, visual context, information context, user context are all forms of contextual information that affect how the user interprets the information component. By altering any of these peripheral inputs, an author can influence the user‘s interpretation.

For application developers it is useful to consider what contextual cues can be made available to the user of an information management application to assist them with their information management tasks. For content authors where a specific meaning is intended to be communicated by the content, it is important to ensure the contextual elements surrounding the message help convey the appropriate message. It is not sufficient to just supply pieces of information, the context of these information elements must also be considered.