Representation of procedures and practices in contextual graphs

Over the last ten years a community on context has emerged. Brézillon (1999) proposed a survey of the literature about context in artificial intelligence. There is a now series of conference on context, a web site and a mailing list. The number of web pages with the word “context” has been multiply by ten in the last five years. Being among the instigators of the use of context in real-world applications, we present in this paper the evolution of our thoughts over the last years and the result that is obtained as a representation formalism based on contextual graphs and used in a real-world application called SART. We present how procedures, practices and context are intertwined, as identified in the SART application and in different domains. We root our view of context in the artificial intelligence area and give a general presentation of our view of context under the three aspects of external knowledge, contextual knowledge and proceduralized context, with the implementation of this view in contextual graphs. We discuss the representation of a reasoning, based on procedure and practices, in the formalism of contextual graphs and present how incremental acquisition of practices is integrated in this formalism.