March 2014 Summaries

Snowplow has introduced a new feature called "custom contexts" to its JavaScript Tracker, aiming to enhance data analytics by providing richer event context. This feature is accompanied by a user guide and a blog post that delves into the theory of event context, which is defined as the environment and manner in which an event occurs, paralleling adverbial concepts of time, manner, and place. The blog post explains how event context is integral to Snowplow's Canonical Event Model, with a significant portion of its 98 fields dedicated to contextual information such as temporal, geographical, environmental, narratorial, and antecedental data. Event context is sourced from primary, secondary, and derived contexts, with examples like timestamps and geographical data illustrating their varying reliability and uses. The discussion also touches on the complexity of context, emphasizing how an event's context can serve as the object in another event and the potential integration of prepositional objects into the broader context concept. Snowplow sees enormous potential in capturing more context across different platforms and environments, refining how context is structured and stored, and exploring new ways to enhance its analytics capabilities.