Context-dependent car navigation as kind of human-machine collaborative interaction

This is a paper about one of our research area´s most evasive concepts, namely that of “context”. In HCI as well as UbiComp, it has inspired many projects venturing to exploit the semantics of individual users´ contexts. That is lead by intentions to study the potential of human-machine collaborative interaction and make applications behave more efficiently, user-friendly and invisibly. This has not considerably turned into a new paradigm of computing, we believe, due to a not completely satisfied theoretical model of what context really is. This paper intends to alleviate that by specifying a model of context that is even more personal, and by that better adapted to the particular domain of in-car navigation. The model is next used to implement an application, which demonstrates its usefulness. Future work shall take this experiment further, to support the inner-local context-aware functionality of such systems in practice.