Managing and understanding context

This chapter focuses on the interpretation and understanding of context and proposes methods for managing contexts in the area of personal and collaborative information management. The concept of user context is introduced in an informal way and its implementation in the ACTIVE knowledge workspace is described. We elaborate on two perspectives of context management: the top-down and the bottom-up perspectives. The use of context management is examined in the light of real-world deployment of the ACTIVE knowledge workspace. For this purpose Microsoft Windows File Explorer, Internet Explorer and MS Office tools were extended into context-aware collaboration platform which was deployed at BT as described in Chap. 9 . This software is also available from www.active-project.eu for research purposes.