ABSTRACT
THEME This chapter builds on the previous chapter and examines the nature of knowledge as it applies to natural disasters. The examination leads to the first key concepts in defining the new contextual-based processing model, that of dimension. The chapter continues with a detailed examination of the nature of data and information so that the more subtle nuances of the model may be understood in the similarity and analysis discussion. This is presented as a further defining basis for the context model. The initial model is then discussed and explained, and a potential semantic grammar is developed for controlling processing and dissemination of contextual information. This grammar is open architected in the types of specific application responses a user of the context model might apply to knowledge derived from contextual processing. The initial context model has some weakness because of how contextually based information might be collected. Therefore, the argument for aggregation of contextual data into supercontexts is examined. Aggregation is done via similarity analysis. Some potential methods are discussed for reasoning about similarity, and some ideas about how they could be applied to contextual modeling are presented. The chapter concludes with some thoughts about the nature of context quality as it may be applied to the
confidence of processing and utilization of knowledge from contextual processing.
