Modelling levels for actor activity:
1. Conceptual level
The conceptual level concerns the concepts “activity”, “reasoning”, “context”, “contextual element” and “experience”, these concepts of interest being not (at least totally) formalized. Our goal is to propose a formalisation of “context” in order to have an efficient formalism for modelling the other concepts of interest. We adhere to the definition of Sarrazin et al. (1996): “an activity is the (physical and mental) behaviour that an actor exhibits for realizing a task”. The notion of activity encompasses that of “task realisation” including actor that accomplishes the task. Modelling an activity involves modelling reasoning to justify the move from a step to the next one. As a consequence, an actor apprehends an activity through a mental model including its development (reasoning steps with processes and decision holds at each move between steps). At the end of each activity step, the next step is chosen by either a deductive (i.e. sequential) reasoning or contextual knowledge if there are alternatives.
Decision-making, as an operational representation of reasoning, often is described as the process of collecting, assembling and structuring the relevant knowledge and information to contextualise the decision for action. Reasoning is a cognitive process that underlies and guides the activity, and the actor is part of the context-based modelling loop.
Context allows distinguishing contextual knowledge and external knowledge concerning activity development. Contextual knowledge is the set of elements related in a flat way to activity development, while external knowledge concerns elements of the context that are not important for the actor’s focus at hand. Context changing during activity development, the frontier between the two types of knowledge is porous. An element of contextual knowledge can become external if it is no more of interest, and, conversely, an element of external knowledge can become contextual because considered for the development of the activity
Decision-making, as an operational representation of reasoning, often is described as the process of collecting, assembling and structuring the relevant knowledge and information to contextualise the decision for action. Reasoning is a cognitive process that underlies and guides the activity, and the actor is part of the context-based modelling loop.
Context allows distinguishing contextual knowledge and external knowledge concerning activity development. Contextual knowledge is the set of elements related in a flat way to activity development, while external knowledge concerns elements of the context that are not important for the actor’s focus at hand. Context changing during activity development, the frontier between the two types of knowledge is porous. An element of contextual knowledge can become external if it is no more of interest, and, conversely, an element of external knowledge can become contextual because considered for the development of the activity
