Personal context modelling and annotation

Abstract

Context is a fundamental tool humans use for understanding their environment, and it must be modelled in a way that accounts for the complexity faced in the real world. Current context modelling approaches mostly focus on a priori defined environments, while the majority of human life is in open, and hence complex and unpredictable, environments. We propose a context model where the context is organized according to the different dimensions of the user environment. In addition, we propose the notions of endurants and perdurants as a way to describe how humans aggregate their context depending either on space or time, respectively. To ground our modelling approach in the reality of users, we collaborate with sociology experts in an internal university project aiming at understanding how behavioral patterns of university students in their everyday life affect their academic performance. Our contribution is a methodology for developing annotations general enough to account for human life in open domains and to be consistent with both sensor data and sociological approaches.