Assistopedia: Mixed-initiative collaboration for social network creation

To alleviate some of the more difficult and tedious tasks in collaboratively constructing information sources (e.g. Wikipedia), we propose Assistopedia, a mixed-initiative content collaboration system for building social networks. Assistopedia allows distributed human users and information agents to collectively construct social networks of specific interest to aid decision support for Stability and Reconstruction Operations (SARO). Information agents can perform tasks such as monitoring sources for changes and updating the network, or pulling in vast amounts of new information into network, thereby freeing up the human users to add the richer and more sophisticated information that is beyond the scope of the agents. Once constructed, users can query the network to answer SARO questions such as Who to talk to and Where to contact that person since these are all different attributes a user (or agent) could add to people in the network given its open structure. We will find real world sources from which to construct a test network that we will use to evaluate real world SARO questions. Further, we plan to interview military experts with SARO experience to help us evaluate the utility and direction of our approach.