Capturing Sub-Saharan African Sociality in Social Networks to Generate a Culturally Realistic Population

Abstract

Choosing to Design a decision support system aimed at developing the user's intercultural communication skills by making him experiment with the planning, sending and spreading of messages and their effects is particularly challenging: if the propagation process is to be realistic and accurate, it is necessary to create a virtual population represented by a network encapsulating specific cultural features. The goal of this paper is to propose a way of capturing a socio-cultural context by the study of the specific forms of sociality of the chosen people and how these forms organize their society. It allows to determine the relevant network layers (dimensions) and ultimately to generate a multidimensional social network representing a realistic population. The chosen context here is sub-Saharan Africa, with the additional requirement of simulating societies of failed, failing and war torn States, the intended user being a member of a peacekeeping force.