A Context Model for Collaborative Environment

Context awareness, context sharing and context processing are key requirements for the future CSCW, HCI and ubiquitous computing systems. Until now, the collaborative context factors have been seldom specifically addressed. This paper argues that a generic context model is very important for building context-aware collaborative applications. A new semantic rich context model for collaborative environment is proposed. The conceptual model for context is described as ontology for contextual collaborative applications (OCCA). The model for context query & memory service, context matching service and control policies is illustrated. Information space, interaction space and collaboration control mechanisms are built up or implemented based on this context model