The aim of this paper is to review the most important research initiatives concerning context in computer science. Context aspects are a key issue for many research communities like artificial intelligence, real time systems or mobile computing, because it relates information processing and communication to aspects of the situations in which such processing occurs. The overview addresses the ways context is defined and understood in various computer science fields and tries to estimate the role of context in the novel scenario of the Semantic Web, by studying the particularities of this setting, compared to the Artificial Intelligence or Natural Language Processing ones, and the consequences of these particularities in resolving the key questions concerning contextual aspects.
