Erlend's view on Context

I find the use of the concept "Context" to be troublesome, and the reason for that is that the phrase are overloaded - everything is context - depeding on your context.

My understanding is "a set of variables describing a situation".

In the project of developing a new version of 24751 - providing a set of concepts/properties to describe the individuals preferences.

We could choose two different approaches for context: (at least)
1) We could add a property *context*
2) We could see the context as a set of existing properties

And as you might guess I'm in favour of option 2.

I would argue that in our world of describing a persons preferences, or a "thing"'s preferences, the context of the person or the thing is the properties of the person or the thing that describes the context of the thing. By adding a separate context attribute/property I would argue that we are adding confusion, and not real value for our usage. I have (due to my lack of imagination/knowledge/insight) problems seeing what a context property would add, I would also argue that if "something" would be used as value in a potential context concept/property, we should model that "something" as a separate concept/property and assosiate it directly to the person or thing.

Example

At the core

I think it is important that we have a clear understanding of what is at the core of what we are trying to describe.
We should agree that at the core is a person when we are describing a persons needs and preferences, when we are describing a resource, then the resource are at the core.
In these examples the person is at the centre.

Without context

If we view all possible properties we would have this picture:

However if we would like to describe a specific situation of the person, we choose a set of the properties of the person, or if the person have specific preferences in a given situation, we would choose one set:

If the person are in a different situation, another set of preferences would be chosen.

Or another one - you get the picture:

I'm not sure if adding a context property would help.