Abstract—Pervasive systems refer to context-aware systems that can sense their context, and adapt their behavior accordingly to provide adaptable services. Proactive adaptation of such systems allows changing the service and the context-based on prediction. However, the definition of the context is still vague and not suitable to prediction. In this paper, we discuss and classify previous definitions of context. Then, we present a new definition which allows pervasive systems to understand and predict their contexts. We analyze the essential lines that fall within the context definition and propose some scenarios to make it clear our approach.