Calendars as User Context Providers in a E-learning Environment

Abstract

User context is a key issue in context-aware systems’ ability to adapt to the contextual environment. Within the area of context-awareness there is a lack of research on the contextual information that specifies the context of the users. In this thesis a study of the capturing of user context from calendars is conducted. The work include a study on calendar users and their motivation for using calendars, a study on real-world calendars’ reliability as sources for context extraction and a study on the users’ preferences on how they manage and organize their calendars. We found that motivation is of key importance for the users’ attention to the calendars’ content and it is strongly correlated to the calendars’ content. We also stress the necessity of introducing user models - based on the low quality of real-world calendars, and we identify contextual features that users consider during calendar usage.