Using Activity Theory to Model Context Awareness

One of the cornerstones of any intelligent entity is the ability to understand how occurrences in the surrounding world influence its own behaviour. Different states, or situations, in its environment should be taken into account when reasoning or acting. When dealing with different situations, context is the key element used to infer possible actions and information needs. The activities of the perceiving agent and other entities are arguably one of the most important features of a situation; this is equally true whether the agent is artificial or not. This work proposes the use of Activity Theory to first model context and further on populate the model for assessing situations in a pervasive computing environment. Through the socio-technical perspective given by Activity Theory, the knowledge intensive context model, utilised in our ambient intelligent system, is designed.