Modeling and Using Context

Context has emerged as a central concept in a variety of contemporary app- aches to reasoning. The conference at which the papers in this volume were presented was the third international, interdisciplinary conference on the topic of context, and was held in Dundee, Scotland on July 27-30, 2001. The ?rst conference in this series was held in Rio de Janiero in 1997, and the second in Trento in 1999. Like the previous conferences, CONTEXT 2001 was remarkably successful in bringing together representatives of many di?erent ?elds, spanning the entire range of the cognitive and informational sciences, and with interests ranging from speci?c, commercial applications to highly general philosophical and logical theories. The papers collected here demonstrate well the range of context-related - search. While foundational problems remain, and continue to be discussed in many of the contributions collected in this volume, the work shows increased - phistication about what forms of reasoning are important, and what techniques are appropriate in accounting for them. The papers themselves, however, do not convey the lively excitement of the conference itself, and the continuing spirit of cooperation and communication across disciplines that has been the hallmark of these conferences. We are very pleased that the ?eld of context research has shown over four years intense, sustained development while retaining this sense of interdisciplinary cooperation.