A Layered Model for User Context Management with Controlled Aging and Imperfection Handling

Current research in context-awareness is biased toward low-level context information. High-level context information, however, poses several challenges to context management systems, which can be traced back to the asynchronicity of context acquisition and use and the inherent dynamics and imperfection in that process. This paper presents a three layer model allowing for dealing with the problems of imperfection and aging in a controlled way. It conceives the problem of high-level user context management as an information management problem with specific requirements. The approach has been applied to a context-aware learning environment for corporate learning support.