An architecture for socio-cultural modeling

This paper presents an architecture for socio-cultural modeling. This sociocognitive and ethnographical approach and method to impact analysis of psychological factors in crisis management is based on the central concept of social actors. Social actors are people immersed in a social context, with various kinds of factors such as individual, cultural, influence and socio-cognitive factors that determine their behavior. This architecture is focused on decision-making and its impact on people in the context of crisis management. An analysis of impact is proposed with respect to contextual factors of the crisis, factors within the decision team and external factors (such as media and people reactions). An ontology of these decision-related factors was derived and will be presented in the paper. It

enables the analysis of a crisis and the support of its management. Terrain analysis is an important military task, also in operations other than war. Numerous sociocultural details have to be observed under time pressure, and patterns have to be distilled from these details. There frequently is insufficient time to store these patterns in either human memory or digital systems. This severely jeopardizes the adequate execution of these tasks. The proposed architecture can be seen as an electronic implementation of cognitive functions that are used by people in the execution of a task in a socio-cultural context. We propose the development of a system that helps observers and analysts with an appropriate external memory support. This is expected to improve socio-cultural learning in various crisis contexts, valorize logistical and structural adaptation, optimize and value changes of limiting habits and attitudes, help in the organization of crisis management, support crisis simulation seminars, take into account experience feedback, crossfertilize experiences and invent new intervention means.