Smart Questions: Context-dependent mobile information exchange for military operations

During military missions, mobile devices allow information exchange between distributed groups of soldiers. As the context of use changes frequently and more (unstructured) information becomes available during missions, the challenge is to ensure that the right information reaches the right recipients at the right moment. This paper presents the concept of Smart Questions, a mobile, context-dependent information exchange system that matches information elements (answers) to information needs (questions). We define three use cases for this concept within the military domain: `Soldier as sensor´, `Reach back´ and `Peer-to-peer´. Military end-users evaluated potential benefits of each use case for (future) military operations.