Contextualization (computer science)

In computer science, contextualization is the process of identifying the data relevant to an entity (e.g., a person or a city) based on the entity’s contextual information .

Definition

Context or contextual information is any information about any entity that can be used to effectively reduce the amount of reasoning required (via filtering, aggregation, and inference) for decision making within the scope of a specific application . Contextualisation is then the process of identifying the data relevant to an entity based on the entity’s contextual information. Contextualisation excludes irrelevant data from consideration and has the potential to reduce data from several aspects including volume, velocity, and variety in large-scale data intensive applications (Yavari et al.) .

Usage

Templates permit one to define generic capacities and behavior of objects, and default values for some object properties, without imposing strict limits on these properties. Contextualization is an initialization phase permitting one, on instantiation of such a template, to obtain the desired object with precisely customized properties.

Example domains

• Object-oriented programming: Contextualization consists, at object creation time, to provide adequate initialization parameters to a class constructor.
• Virtualization: Contextualization permits, at the end of VM instantiation, to set or override VM data having unknown or default values at the time of creation of the Live CD, typically hostname, IP address, .ssh/authorized_keys, ...