Thomas R. Roth-Berghofer - Böcker

Computing in context has become a necessity in modern and intelligent IT - plications. With the use of mobile devices and current research on ubiquitous computing, context-awareness has become a major issue. However, context and context-awareness are crucial not only for mobile and ubiquitous computing. They are also vital for spanning various application areas, such as collaborative softwareand Web engineering,personaldigital assistantsand peer-to-peer inf- mation sharing, health care work?ow and patient control, and adaptive games and e-learning solutions. In these areas, context serves as a major source for reasoning, decision making, and adaptation, as it covers not only application knowledge but also environmental knowledge.Likewise, modeling and retrieving context is an important part of modern knowledge management processes. In addition, context can play a role in determining what information a s- tem should provide. This is important for supporting the users of automated or intelligent systems, for tasks such as explaining how solutions are found, what the system is doing, and why it operates in a certain way. The methods applied and the advice given have to be explained, so that the user can understand the process and agree on decisions. Context is equally important for deciding when to provide uncertain or blurred information, e.g., when using a tracking system in situations for which either revealing the current position, or denying access to it, would have adverse e?ects. In this wide range of applications, context is now more than just location.

Context a?ects a wide range of activities in humans and animals as well as in arti?cialagentsandothersystems.Theimportanceofcontextiswidelyackno- edged, and “context” has become an area of study in its own right, as evidenced bynumerousworkshops,symposia,seminars,andconferencesonthisarea.CON- TEXT,theoldestconferenceseriesfocusing oncontext,is unique inits emphasis on interdisciplinary research. Previous CONTEXT conferences have been held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (CONTEXT’97), Trento, Italy (CONTEXT’99, LNCS 1688), Dundee, UK (CONTEXT 2001, LNCS 2116), Palo Alto, USA (CON- TEXT 2003, LNCS 2680), and Paris, France (CONTEXT 2005, LNCS 3554). Each of these brought together researchers and practitioners from a large range of ?elds to discuss and report on context-related research and projects. The CONTEXT 2007 conference was held at Roskilde University, Denmark. The ?rst two days were devoted to workshops on speci?c areas of interest to the context community and, in parallel, the doctoralconsortium. The remaining three days featured invited talks, presentations, and posters on both theoretical and applied context research. This volume contains the papers presented at CONTEXT 2007, the Sixth International and Interdisciplinary Conference on Modeling and Using Context. There were 121 submissions to the conference. The committee decided to accept 42 papers on the basis of a thorough and highly selective review process. We believe that the papers of this volume represent a snapshot of current work and contribute to both theoretical and applied aspects of research.