A Formal Definition of Situation towards Situation-Aware Computing

Context-aware computing has emerged as a promising way to build intelligent and dynamic systems in overall computer science areas such as ubiquitous computing, multi-agent systems, and web services. For constructing the knowledgebase in such systems, various context modeling and reasoning techniques were introduced. Recently the concept of situation-awareness is focused beyond the context-awareness. In fact, the concept of situation is not a new one; McCarthy has introduced the theory of situation calculus in 1963 and Reiter et al. formalized it based on action theory. Recent works are trying to exploit the concept of situation for understanding and representing computing elements and environments in more comprehensive way beyond context. However, in such research, the situation is not defined and differentiated from the context clearly. Accordingly, the systems do not take advantage of the situation. In this paper, we provide a formal definition of the situation and differentiate it from the context clearly.