A computer language for agroecological extension: an appropriate technology to the context of Serra da Capivara Territory, Brazilian Caatinga

• Autor(a) principal: Jaffe, Maxim Simões de Abreu
• Data de Publicação: 2021
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10348/11136
• topic: agroecology; rural extension

This dissertation aims to understand what makes an information technology appropriate for agroecological extension in the context of the Serra da Capivara Territory. Based on a conceptual overview, end-user development was identified as a key for an appropriate information technology. An ethnographic study on Projeto Quipá’s 2015 campaign identified that end-user development has great potential to solve several issues faced by agroecological extension organisations, professionals and rural communities. Portuguese language was identified as being the main communication and information medium in this agroecological extension context. Based on this ethnographic study a set of requirements were specified with Portuguese-based syntax and semantics being the most important requirement. While no existing solutions seem to adequately fulfil identified requirements an exploratory survey identified several features in existing solutions that can be incorporated into a new solution. Dialogo is a new computer language proposed to fulfil selected requirements. Dialogo is a Portuguese controlled language that can be used to describe people, plants, animals, things, situations, actions, decisions and more using a flexible entity-relationship based model. The current development approach is based on an open source project strategy. Potential implementation platform and language were identified for future implementations. Cognitive load and cognitive dimensions approaches were selected to evaluate the proposed specification and future implementations.