Context-driven information base update

A major issue in information management is information update. In this paper we address this problem within the framework of a fairly general information model incorporating notions of context as a way to control and drive the update operations. We introduce three kinds of contexts: role,task and focus context. Role context relates users with update tasks, task context restricts the scope of updates and focus context is used to guide the user at run-time. In particular, we focus on issues regarding the expressive power of contexts, the consistency of context declarations with the contents of the information base, flexibility and brevity of context declaration and management and utilization of contexts. An implementation is proposed as part of a specific system, the Semantic Index System.