> Is there any particular theory of context that you find especially
> convincing? (01)
Well, "context" itself is such a weasel word that there's no one
account that does it all. Various theories have different strengths
and highlight different aspects of context. There are several people
currently doing some very promising work based on McCarthy's original
ideas (http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/mccarthy93notes.html), but I'm not
sure anything is available for public consumption yet; I'll pass
anything on that I hear about. McCarthy's former students Sasa Buvac
and Ian Mason did some nice model theoretic work that captures some
of the more important of McCarthy's intuitions (http://
citeseer.ist.psu.edu/buvac93propositional.html; http://
citeseer.ist.psu.edu/245732.html; http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/
8458.html). I also like some of the things that Fausto Giunchiglia
has done quite a lot. His work stresses the intentional side of the
idea of context, where contexts are thought of, roughly, as sets of
beliefs: http://dit.unitn.it/~fausto. By contrast, inspired by both
McCarthy and situation theory, I develop a nonintentional notion of
context, on which contexts are spatio-temporally extended pieces of
the world in "The Objective Conception of Context and Its
Logic" (Minds and Machines 9 (1999) pp. 29-56, online at http://
philebus.tamu.edu/cmenzel/Papers/mm-paper.pdf). (02)
Useful surveys are found in Patrick Brezillon's "Context in
Artificial Intelligence: I. A Survey of the literature" (http://
citeseer.ist.psu.edu/502745.html) and Akman and Surav's "Steps Toward
Formalizing Context" (http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/akman96steps.html). (03)
-chris (04)
_________________________________________________________________
Message Archives: http://ontolog.cim3.net/forum/ontolog-forum/
Subscribe/Unsubscribe/Config:
http://ontolog.cim3.net/mailman/listinfo/ontolog-forum/
Shared Files: http://ontolog.cim3.net/file/
Community Wiki: http://ontolog.cim3.net/wiki/
To Post: mailto:ontolog-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (05)
|