Definitions given by earlier works and standard dictionaries agree on the key idea that context describe situation. This definition clearly states that context is always bound to an entity. The entity itself is regarded as something that is relevant to the interaction between a user and an application. The user-application relationship is rooted in the traditional notion of an application, but not limited to it.

Dey and Abowd (2000) have also confirmed this by defining context as:

‘‘Any information that can be used to characterize the situation of an entity. An entity is a person, a place, or a physical or computational object that is considered relevant to the interaction between a user and an application, including the user and application themselves.’’ 

Winograd (2001) indicated that definitions like this are intended to be adequately general to cover the work that has been done on context-based interactions. He however argues that in using open-ended phrases such as ‘‘any information’’ and ‘‘characterize’’, it becomes so broad that context covers everything without boundary. According to Winograd, ‘‘something is context because of the way it is used in interpretation, not due to its inherent properties. The voltage on the power lines is a context if there is some action by the user and/or computer whose interpretation is dependent on it, but otherwise is just part of the environment.’’

Pascoe defines context as “Context could be generally described as the subset of physical and conceptual states of interest to a particular entity.” Contextual information is related to a certain entity.

References :

[1] N.Datia ,J Moura-Pires .M.Cardoso ,H.Pita , “Temporal Patterns o fTV Watching For Portugues Viewers “. 

[2]Joe Jeffrey ,”High Fidelity Mathematical Models of Social Systems “, Northen Illinois Unversity. 

[3] Ray van Brandenburg , Master Thesis Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science, Design and Analysis of Communication Systems (DACS),University of Twente” Towards multi-user personalized TV services,introducing combined RFID Digest authentication” ,Dec2007,Master thesis 

[4] Paul Resnick ,Neophytos Iacovou ,Mitesh Suchak Peter Bergstorm ,and John Riedli ,”Grouplens : An open architecture for collaborative filtering of netnews , “ in Proc.ACM Conf.Computer Supported Cooperative Work ,Chape Hill ,NC,USA ,1994,pp.175 -186.