A terminology wanting applications. 

When surfing yesterday, I came upon the phrase: "context aware computing" and through mental association could not help but think of the Categories system which is used on this and other Wiki Systems. The category system as now used serves as a crude context indication schema. It is not finely enough tuned as to be effective as a means of allowing systems to become aware of the context of the page or pages to which it is attached, usually at the end. 

I found in reading the link given here: 
* http://www.visi.com/~snowfall/AskNotForWhom.html  
** by Thomas Erickson of the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, --[2002]
something about the problems associated with this paradigm: 

''In short, context-aware computing would do better to emulate the approach taken in ScientificVisualization? rather than trying to re-enact AI's attempts at natural language understanding and problem solving.''

and, ''It is also because, by invoking the powerful notions of "context" and "awareness", concepts which people understand very differently from the way in which they are being instantiated in context-aware systems, it opens a rather large gap between human expectations and the abilities of 'context-aware' systems.''

Properly functioning machines can only do what they are programmed to do. That any programmer or computing specialists can create a program to be independently made "aware" of the context of its target can be said to be "nearly impossible".

I say nearly impossible, because it may be possible with a little "human help". Just as Categories are assigned to pages, however imperfectly or to everyone's satisfaction by the intercession of a human agent, they do give a clue as to what the page contains. This is in addition to the Title of the page, which has the same imperfectness, but which also gives clue as to the context of the page.

When speaking of "awareness" in a computing sense, we are usually talking about the page having attributes or subjective matter which meets some sort of criteria. Thus to say that the system is aware of the page being "long", one might have set up criteria which gives the system this notion if the page is over some number, like 32000 characters in length. To say that the system might be at some difficulty level, might also be based on some tests as to the length in characters of the average word, or some other algorithm applied to its content. To say that the system might be "aware" that the page is about ExtremeProgramming might be based upon the presence of the term itself, or of words associated with concepts found in its application. In addition to characteristics which exist due to the content words, phrases, subjects, etc., the system might also be made aware of context by extended markup (not part of the human-readable text) which furnishes "context" for the system's awareness separate from its text.

In addition to the computer system being "aware" of the content of computing artifacts, it might also be made aware of the artifact's status and availability. Other ways a Computer System might be made "aware" is of the System and its resources, and the user and users status and availability.

"Context aware devices may also try to make assumptions about the user's current situation" Dey (2001) defines context as "any information that can be used to characterize the situation of entities".

Related:
* Designing Agents as if People Mattered
** http://www.visi.com/~snowfall/agents.html
* Ontological Dimensions
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CategoryAutomated