System Environment and Context-Awareness

Abstract

Referring to the previous chapter, whenever a group of entities (actor-roles) collectively realize a goal, we consider them to belong to a system. What has not been discussed in the mentioned chapter nevertheless is adaptability—we observe that in their behavior, humans are adapting every minute and every second to what is happening around (a human would often do this intuitively), and for this reason it makes sense considering this issue with regard to systems and especially enterprise systems (and EIS) which are human-driven. An adaptable system has the ability to adjust to new conditions [1]. An essential feature of adaptable systems is context-awareness [2]—this is adjusting the system behavior depending on the situation at hand (context state) [3]. As studied in [2], context-aware systems are all about adjusting “something” to the context state; however, what is adjusted differs: (1) Some context-aware systems optimize system-internal processes based on the context state at hand [4, 5], for example, regulating the electro-consumption of home appliances for the sake of keeping the overall building consumption within some boundaries. (2) Other context-aware systems maximize the user-perceived effectiveness of delivered services, by providing different service variants depending on the situation of the user [6], for example, treating a distantly monitored patient in one way when his/her condition is normal and in another way in case of emergency. (3) Still other context-aware systems are about offering value sensitivity when the society demands so [7], for example, in the case of supporting judiciary processes, different levels of transparency are to be provided to different categories of stakeholders. We do not claim exhaustiveness with regard to those three context-awareness perspectives. At the same time, as studied in [2], those three perspectives “cover” a broad range of currently relevant applications, especially as it concerns real-life (business) processes. For this reason, we will elaborate and discuss those perspectives in the first section of the current chapter. Then in Sect. 3.2 we will conceptualize context-awareness (considering it in general). In Sect. 3.3, we will consider the operationalization of context-awareness—by means of context-aware applications. In Sect. 3.4, we will address the potentials of (statistical) data analysis [8] with regard to context-aware applications. Finally, in Sect. 3.5 we will briefly discuss the relevance of classification (and decision trees, in particular) as a prediction “instrument” [9] in the cases when sensing technology [10] is inapplicable.