The aim of this paper is to review the most important research initiatives
concerning context in computer science. Context aspects are a key issue for
many research communities like artificial intelligence, real time systems or
mobile computing, because it relates information processing and communication
to aspects of the situations in which such processing occurs. The overview
addresses the ways context is defined and understood in various computer
science fields and tries to estimate the role of context in the novel scenario
of the Semantic Web, by studying the particularities of this setting, compared
to the Artificial Intelligence or Natural Language Processing ones, and the
consequences of these particularities in resolving the key questions
concerning contextual aspects
