Patrick Brezillon – författare

This volume of Annals of Information Systems will acknowledge the twentieth anniversary of the founding of the International Society for Decision Support Systems (ISDSS) by documenting some of the current best practices in teaching and research and envisioning the next twenty years in the decision support systems field. The volume is intended to complement existing DSS literature by offering an outlet for thoughts and research particularly suited to the theme of describing the next twenty years in the area of decision support.

Several subthemes are planned for the volume. One subtheme draws on the assessments of internationally known DSS researchers to evaluate where the field has been and what has been accomplished. A second subtheme of the volume will be describing the current best practices of DSS research and teaching efforts. A third subtheme will be an assessment by top DSS scholars on where the DSS discipline needs to focus in the future. The tone of this volume is one of enthusiasm for the potential contributions to come in the area of DSS; contributions that must incorporate an understanding of what has been accomplished in the past, build on the best practices of today, and be integrated into future decision making practices.

This volume explores how context has been and can be used in computing to model human behaviors, actions and communications as well as to manage data and knowledge. It addresses context management and exploitation of context for sharing experience across domains.

The book serves as a user-centric guide for readers wishing to develop context-based applications, as well as an intellectual reference on the concept of context. It provides a broad yet deep treatment of context in computing and related areas that depend heavily on computing. The coverage is broad because of its cross-disciplinary nature but treats topics at a sufficient depth to permit a reader to implement context in his/her computational endeavors.

The volume addresses how context can be integrated in software and systems and how it can be used in a computing environment. Furthermore, the use of context to represent the human dimension, individually as well as collectively is explained. Contributions also include descriptions of how context has been represented in formal as well as non-formal, structured approaches. The last section describes several human behavior representation paradigms based on the concept of context as its central representational element.

The depth and breadth of this content is certain to provide useful as well as intellectually enriching information to readers of diverse backgrounds who have an interest in or are intrigued by using context to assist in their representation of the real world.

This book is the outcome of 25 years of research on how to model and use context in real-world applications on a spectrum from technology-centered (SEPT, SART) to human-centered (e.g. FlexMIm) applications, that is, from well-defined domains to more fuzzy ones.

·         an operational definition of context that initiated a conceptual framework associated with an implementation framework, the Contextual-Graphs (CxG) formalism

·         the use of the research for designing a future type of AI systems, namely the context-based intelligent assistant systems

There is a large international and interdisciplinary community of individuals convinced by the promises of bottom-up approaches as an alternative to the current top-down approaches in AI mainly. Practitioners will discover a tool easy to understand and use. Researchers will dispose of a comprehensive conceptual framework facilitating its extension on aspects not yet covered beyond group activity modeling, in the realm of the research on AI systems.