It seems context is not only a buzzword within information retrieval:
One of the hottest concepts in mobile right now is the idea of context.
The thought process goes something like this: because the modern smartphone comes equipped with all kinds of sensors, is always on, and tends to be touched by its owner quite frequently, mobile app developers have an opportunity to learn from all these implicit and explicit cues. Taken together, elements like location, time, velocity, behavior, etc. can begin to paint a picture of the exact context of the moment.
As a software developer, if you can establish context, you can do all kinds of cool things around delivering entertaining or useful content or functionality that will be appreciated by the user at that particular moment of time.
In a nutshell, this is the promise of mobile. You can provide experiences that were simply not possible when the desktop was the primary computing device.
The poster child example of this sort of interaction is called geofencing, and uses a location trigger.
While location as such already represents contextual information, the next step from geofencing is
“Chronofencing” – the delivery of contextually important information based on a time trigger. Chronofences differ from calendar alerts in that they don’t alert you to the event itself – crucially, they provide additional information, from beyond your calendar, that may be useful to you at that moment.
Chronofencing, properly executed, has the potential to fulfill the promise of delivering the right info to the right people at the right moment – in a way that geofencing never could.
Source: Context and the Calendar: An Introduction to Chronofencing http://tnw.to/d4QQ via @TNWinsider 9 September 2012
This development could certainly be of interest for legal information retrieval and delivery of legal services in general. We are talking law as an app nevertheless …..