Understanding the social contexts in which actions and interactions take place is of utmost importance for planning one’s goals and activities. People use social practices as means to make sense of their environment, assessing how that context relates to past, common experiences, culture and capabilities. Social practices can therefore simplify deliberation and planning in complex contexts. In the context of patient-centered planning, hospitals seek means to ensure that patients and their families are at the center of decisions and planning of the healthcare processes. This requires on one hand that patients are aware of the practices being in place at the hospital and on the other hand that hospitals have the means to evaluate and adapt current practices to the needs of the patients. In this paper we apply a framework for formalizing social practices of an organization to an emergency department that carries out patient-centered planning. We indicate how such a formalization can be used to answer operational queries about the expected outcome of operational actions.

With regard to context-aware systems: some optimize system-internal processes, based on the context state at hand; others maximize the user-perceived effectiveness of delivered services, by providing different service variants depending on the situation of the user; still others are about offering value-sensitivity when the society demands so. Even though those three perspectives cover a broad range of currently relevant applications there are no widely accepted and commonly used corresponding concepts and terms. This is an obstacle to broadly understand, effectively integrate, and adequately assess such systems. We address this problem, by considering a (component-based) methodological derivation of technical (software) specifications based on underlying enterprise models. That is because context states are about the enterprise environment of a (software) system while the delivery of context-aware services is about technical (software) functionalities; hence, we need a perspective on both. We consider the SDBC (Software Derived from Business Components) approach that brings together enterprise modeling and software specification. On that basis: (a) We deliver a base context-awareness conceptualization; (b) We partially align it to agent technology because adapting behaviors to environments assumes some kind of pro-activity that is only fully covered by agent systems, in our view. We partially illustrate our proposed conceptualization and particularly - the agent technology implications, by means of a case example featuring land border security.