Representation of procedures and practices in contextual graphs

Over the last ten years a community that is interested in context has emerged. Brézillon (1999) gave a survey of the literature on context in artificial intelligence. There is now a series of conferences on context, a website and a mailing list. The number of web pages with the word “context” has increased tenfold in the last five years. Being among the instigators of the use of context in real-world applications, I present in this paper the evolution of my thoughts over the last years and the results that have been obtained, including a representation formalism based on contextual graphs and the use of this formalism in a real-world application called SART. I present how procedures, practices and context are intertwined, as identified in the SART application and in different domains. I root my view of context in the artificial intelligence area and give a general presentation of my view of context under the three aspects – external knowledge, contextual knowledge and proceduralised context – with the implementation of this view in contextual graphs. I discuss how reasoning is carried out, based on procedure and practices, in the formalism of contextual graphs and show how incremental acquisition of practices is integrated in this formalism.