Abstract
With new findings about context available now, a new insight is possible on past problems abandoned previously by lack of a relevant solution at that time, like incremental knowledge acquisition, practice learning and explanation generation. Previously, they were considered as distinct problems. Now their integration in the task at hand of the user offers new options, especially for e-collaboration. Hereafter, the article is organized in the following way. First, we comment briefly previous works on explanations in order to point out what is reusable. Second, we discuss explanation generation potentialities in a context-based formalism called contextual graphs. Finally, we show what explanations can bring in e-collaboration, maybe more than in face-to-face collaboration.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Shared Context: Part of the contextual knowledge that is elaborated progressively by actors and thus shared, even if not identical.
Practice: The result of the transformation made by an actor of a procedure for taking into account the specificity of a given context. This is a contextualization of a procedure.
Context-Based Reasoning: A reasoning often cannot be separated from the context in which it takes place. In a rule, the conclusion is intertwined with conditions. Such reasoning is decison making, interpretation, diagnosis, pattern recognition.
Proceduralized Context: The subset of contextual knowledge pieces that are selected, collected, assembled, organized structured in a chunk of knowledge to be used in the current focus (e.g., the current step of problem solving).
Context: Elements that constrain a problem solving without intervening in it explicitly. Two parts are distinguished in the context with respect to a focus, namely the contextual and external knowledge.
Explanation: A presentation by an explainer to an explainee in order to allow the explainee to link a striking information in his/her mental representation of the world based on contextual cues. The line of explanation is not the line of reasoning to explain.
Contextual Graphs: A context-based formalism for representing elements of reasoning and of contexts in a uniform way.