The Evolution of Contextual Information Processing in Informatics

After many decades of flourishing computer science it is now rather evident that in a world dominated by different kinds of digital information, both applications and people are forced to seek new, innovative structures and forms of data management and organization. Following this blunt observation, researchers in informatics have strived over the recent years to tackle the non-unique and rather evolving notion of context, which aids significantly the data disambiguation process. Motivated by this environment, this work attempts to summarize and organize in a researcher-friendly tabular manner important or pioneer related research works deriving from diverse computational intelligence domains: Initially, we discuss the influence of context with respect to traditional low-level multimedia content analysis and search, and retrieval tasks and then we advance to the fields of overall computational context-awareness and the so-called human-generated contextual elements. In an effort to provide meaningful information to fellow researchers, this brief survey focuses on the impact of context in modern and popular computing undertakings of our era. More specifically, we focus to the presentation of a short review of visual context modeling methods, followed by the depiction of context-awareness in modern computing. Works dealing with the interpretation of context by human-generated interactions are also discussed herein, as the particular domain gains an ever-increasing proportion of related research nowadays. We then conclude the paper by providing a short discussion on (i) the motivation behind the included context type categorization into three main pillars; (ii) the findings and conclusions of the survey for each context category; and (iii) a couple of brief advices derived from the survey for both interested developers and fellow researchers