An important issue in groupware is how to improve interaction and collaboration among participants. Through the analysis of the context a user is in or the context that surrounds an interaction, groupware systems can provide users with useful information in that situation. A relevant issue when using context is how to represent context information. Ontologies constitute an interesting method for representing context, since they enable information sharing and reuse. They can also be used by existing inference machines to reason about various contexts. In this paper we propose an ontology to formally represent context in groupware systems. We also present an example where this ontology is used by a logic-based reasoning mechanism for tool recommendation based on the current context of group members. We believe that this ontology could help to understand the role of context in collaboration and thus make the development of context-aware groupware systems easier.
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