Considerations of Context and Quality in Information Fusion

Context has received significant attention in recent years within the Information Fusion community as it can bring several advantages to information fusion processing by allowing for refining estimations, explaining observations and constraining processing and thereby improving the quality of inferences. At the same time context utilization involves concerns about the quality of the contextual information and its relationship with the quality of information obtained from observation and estimations that may be of low fidelity, contradictory, or redundant. Knowledge of the quality of this information and its effect on the quality of context characterization can improve contextual knowledge. At the same time, knowledge about a current context can improve the quality of observation and fusion results. This paper discusses the issues associated with understanding and evaluating Information Quality as well as Quality of Context, their relationships and their effect on fusion system performance.