A New HTTP Request Header for Specifying Task Contexts

IETF HTTP Working Group,

Hello. I recently thought of and would like to share with the group some ideas involving a new HTTP request header, "Context", for providing users’ task contexts to trusted context-aware services, e.g., search engines, Q&A systems, recommender systems, and AI assistants.

As far as I know, it is a new idea to represent task contexts using URLs. In these regards, URLs could refer to business process model diagrams (which task that a user was doing):

https://en.wikiprocess.org/wiki/process12345678.bpmn

and URLs’ fragment identifiers could refer to components in those diagrams (where a user was in that task):

https://en.wikiprocess.org/wiki/process12345678.bpmn#component

Next, these ideas involve using a new HTTP request header, "Context", in a manner resembling:

Context: https://en.wikiprocess.org/wiki/process12345678.bpmn#component

to share URLs both representing and referring to users’ task contexts with trusted context-aware services.

I recently wrote about these ideas in greater detail in a new GitHub issue: https://github.com/WICG/proposals/issues/188 . I would like to invite anyone interested in commenting upon, discussing, and improving upon these ideas to reply either in this mailing list or, preferably, in that GitHub issue.

Thank you for reading and considering these ideas. I am looking forward to discussing them with you.


Best regards,
Adam Sobieski
http://www.phoster.com