Formalization of “Context” for Information Fusion

Context exploitation can provide benefits for information fusion by establishing expectations of world states, explaining received data, and resolving ambiguous interpretations; thereby improving process efficiency, reliability, and trustworthiness of the fusion product. While everybody recognizes the importance of considering context in inferencing, designers of information fusion processes only recently have begun to incorporate context explicitly into fusion processes. Effective context exploitation requires a clear understanding of what context is, how to represent it in a formal way, and how to use it for particular information fusion applications. Although these problems are similar to the ones discussed by researchers in many other fields, consideration of context in designing information fusion systems also poses additional challenges such as understanding the relationships between situations and context, utilizing context for understanding and fusion of natural language data, context dynamics, context recognition, and contextual reasoning under the uncertainty inherent in fusion problems. This chapter provides a brief discussion on possible ways of confronting these challenges while designing information fusion systems.