Information, contextual

Often overlooked but of no less importance, information access breakdowns often occur even when there is no underlying technical reason. Common causes are that it is not clear what system should be used to find a particular piece of information or that its absence on one system incorrectly implies that it is not available elsewhere. Even if a scientist knows which system to use to look for a piece of information, if the interface is not contextualized for her particular domain or project the information may be missed because it is presented in a fashion that is not familiar to the user. A problem that is harder to correct occurs when a person requires a piece of information but is unsure whether that information even exists at all. 

Contextual design is a flexible software design approach that collects multiple customer-centered techniques into an integrated design process [7]. The approach is centered around contextual inquiry sessions in which detailed information is gathered about the way individual people work and use systems and the associated information flow. The data from each contextual inquiry session are used to create sequence models that map the exact workflow in a session along with any information breakdowns, flow models that detail the flow of information between parties and systems (much akin to but less formal... 

Scientific information—the contextual interpretation of experimental data—is published as free text. The same applies to the annotation of experimental results, genes, proteins, and compounds and the description of medical conditions. This clearly indicates that scientific information is not structured, which creates a major challenge for its reuse, management, and statistical analysis. This fact has largely been recognized, and much research... 

Aravind L. Guilt by association contextual information in genome analysis. Genome Res 2000 10[8] 1074-1077. 

Alternatively produced products have in common that their unique selling proposition is not directly visible to the consumer. Only additional information will identify the nature of the origin or the production process of these foods (Oude Ophuis, 1993). Within a sensory evaluation of free range pork under different conditions of experience and awareness, labelling and prior experience of the product have favourable influence on the sensory evaluation of free range pork for a number of attributes. The author assumes that contextual elements are very important in the sensory evaluation of fresh foods. 

Ahmed FP, McLaughlin DP, Stanford SC, Stamford JA (2002) Maudsley reactive and non-reactive (MNRA) rats display hehavioral contrasts on exposure to an open field, the elevated plus maze or the dark-light shuttle hox. Abstract, FENS, Paris, France Ammassari-Teule A, Milhaud JM, Passino E, Restivo L, LassaUe JM (1999) Defective processing of contextual information may he involved in the poor performance of DBA/2 mice in spatial tasks. Behav Genet 29 283-289 Anisman H, Zalcman S, Shanks N, Zacharko RM (1991) Multisystem regulation of performance deficits induced hy stressors an animal model of depression. In Boulton AA, Baker GB, Martin-lverson MT (eds) Animal models in psychiatry, vol 2. Humana Press, Clifton, pp 1-59... 

Data enrichment is presented at the lower left comer of Figure 1. Data enrichment occurs when heterogeneous contextual information is entered in the event database. The same object can be represented by heterogeneous information depending on the data source. For example, the Windows NT event log can give us a host name, the network intrusion detection system a host IP address, and the wireless access point a MAC address, this for the same machine. The data enrichment functions attempt to complete and reconcile heterogeneous information entered in the database. 

To support these functions, we have organized our data model as a set of concentric circles. Our data model is inspired from the Snort relational database schema, the IDMEF message format (Curry et al., 2004), and the M2D2 model (Morin et al., 2002). We participated in deploying these tools and developing these models, so they naturally were used as a starting point for our development. However, we believe that event and contextual information are not equivalent and this is not obvious in the three models cited before. Hence, we choose to provide a different representation shown in Figure 2. 

The arrows of Figure 2 represent examples of links between contextual information and event information. A network event links to host information with source and destination of the network connection. A system event links to local host information indicating on which host the event occurred. 

This information is collected by the vulnerability assessment process. A vulnerability report is generated by a vulnerability assessment tool (for example Nessus3) as an XML file. Information in this file is imported in the events database as contextual information associated with hosts. Since vulnerability reports are associated with security references (bugtraq, CVE, etc.) and IDS signatures are also associated with the same information, it is fairly straightforward to infer the events that create a serious risk for the information system. If an event has as target the host associated with vulnerability X, and as signature one also associated with vulnerability X, then the risk is serious. This is a standard process that is in use in most intrusion-detection products. 

The basic Nordic School approach, that of assessing satisfaction with a cross-section survey or appraisal raises one important dilemma. A criticism of the approach is that, when analysts and stakeholders obtain a set of scores, they may have difficulty in understanding their meaning and lack a context of interpretation. This issue is at the core of the charge made by Parasuraman and colleagues that the expectations approach is superior because it offers valuable contextual information (Parasuraman et al, 1985, 1994b). There are, however, three kinds of extensions to the basic Nordic School system that can augment the value of the post hoc only appraisals. 

The firing rate of hippocampal CA1 pyramidal cells is known to depend on spatial location, that is, contextual environment information related to exploration behavior is encoded by cell activity (Hollup et al., 2001 Thompson and Best, 1990). In the present study, the population spike amplitude (PSA), measured with simultaneous determination of locomotor activity, in the CA1 field evoked by Schaffer collaterals stimulation was slightly decreased during exposure to the open field (Fig. 1). However, no significant difference in changes of synaptic transmission in the CA1 field was observed between the FS groups and non-FS controls (Koseki et al., 2007). 

---