Classifying Context Classifications: an Activity Theory Perspective

In a mobile and ubiquitous computing environment, the interfaces become smaller to disappearing. Moreover, the user’s attention may be divided between several activities and devices. Context awareness plays a key role in reducing explicit user input by taking advantage of the changes in information relating to users, devices and environments. Throughout the context awareness literature, researchers have tried to classify context into different elements that have an influence on a user’s activity as shown in Table 1. There is a multitude of context classification systems, all of which are partial, covering both similar and different elements. Reported context classifications cover different types of context largely depending on their implementation. For the most part, however, context aware applications have utilized only isolated subsets of their context, such as a location or a device’s state, e.g. [1,2]. From the different classification systems, we purpose that the context classification system should cover five key elements; information about user, tools, social, physical environment and time.