Sumer course on Context-Aware Database at University of Antwerp
(apologies for multiple posting)
Sumer course on Context-Aware Database at University of Antwerp
July 14 - 18
>From july 14 to 18, The Computer Science department of theUniversity of Antwerp organises a one-week course on Context-awareDatabases, given by prof. Letizia Tanca, of the Politecnico di Milano. Thelectures will be given from Monday 14/7 until Friday 18/7 - every day atheory session, followed by a practical session. This course is intended and free for Master and PhD students. You can find more information on
Databases" target="_blank">http://www.adrem.ua.ac.be/wiki/Summer_Course_on_Context_Aware_Databases
To register, please send an email to boris.cule@ua.ac.be and bart.goethals@ua.ac.be.
= Abstract =
Many interpretations of the notion of context have emerged in various fields
of research like psychology, philosophy, or computer science. Context-aware
systems are pervading everyday life, therefore context modelling is becoming
a relevant issue and an expanding research field. Context often has a
significant impact on the way humans (or machines) act, and on how they
interpret things; furthermore, a change in context causes a transformation
in the experience that is going to be lived.The word itself, derived from
the Latin con (with or together) and texere (to weave), describes a context
not just as a profile, but as an active process dealing with the way humans
weave their experience within their whole environment, to give it meaning.
Accordingly, while the computer science community has initially perceived
the context as a matter of user location, in the last few years this notion
has been considered not simply as a state, but as part of a process in which
users are involved; thus, sophisticated and general context models have been
proposed, to support context-aware applications which use them to:
(a) adapt interfaces,
(b) determine the set of application-relevant data,
(c) increase the precision of information retrieval,
(d) discover services,
(e) make the user interaction implicit, or
(f) build smart environments.
In Information Management, context-aware systems are mainly devoted to
determining which information is relevant with respect to the ambient
conditions. Indeed, nowadays the amount of available data and data sources
requires not only to integrate them (still a hard problem), but also to
filter (tailor) their information in order to:
1) provide the user with the appropriately tailored set of data,
2) match devices' physical constraints,
3) operate on a manageable amount of data (for improving query processing
efficiency), and
4) provide the user with time- and location-relevant data (mobile
applications). Given this scenario, in this course we try to give a
definition of the notion of context in the database field, and provide a
survey and comparison of the most interesting approaches to context
modelling and usage available in the literature. A comprehensive evaluation
framework, allowing application designers to compare context models with
respect to a given target application, is then provided. In particular, we
analyze more deeply those features and those models which are relevant for
the problem of context-aware data management, where the aim is to provide a
systematic support to the designer of data management applications -- be
them related to a huge (e.g., in data warehousing) or to a very small amount
of data (e.g., in portable, lightweight data management systems) --,in
determining the portions of information which are related to each given
context.The course will be accompanied by exercise sessions in which the
students will design a context-aware database.