Proceedings of the XLVII Italian Society of Agricultural Genetics - SIGA Annual Congress

Verona, Italy - 24/27 September, 2003

ISBN 88-900622-4-X

Poster Abstract - 5.26

TROPOS METHODOLOGIES APPLIED TO AN ANALYSIS OF ACTORS AND GOALS DEPENDENCIES I N THE AGROBIOTECH DEBATE

F. MARIN*^,**, P. BRESCIANI**, L. MARTINELLI*

*) Istituto Agrario San Michele all’Adige, 38010 San Michele all’Adige (TN)

**) ITC-irst, Divisione Sistemi Ragionamento Automatico, 38050 Povo (TN)

actor dependencies, communication of informations, requirement engineering, Science & Society

Even tough interest for science is becoming an integrating part of our culture, the relationship Science-Society is still difficult. In general, public information on research progress is an hard task that needs to be managed with extreme expertise. This is particularly truth in the case of biotechnology, where communication results critical, since emotional, political and cultural aspects merge with the scientific impact of the innovative technology. Recently, we embarked in a project aiming to study the problems related with the communication of agrobiotechnology. The debate on this topic is quite sparkling, involving various levels of interests, roles and actors of the whole society (researchers, students, NGO’s, institutions, families, associations etc.), each group aiming to play an active role in the “dialogue”.

The huge amount of available information on the subject may increase the communication difficulty within the various categories. Besides, information overload and often distorted communication make matters worse. Thus, there is a need to rationally organize the available information. The tool we propose for handling this problem is a specific methodology named Tropos, conceived in the context of the so called requirement engineering, a sub-discipline of the software engineering. This was initially proposed by Prof. E. Yu and Prof. J. Mylopulous of the Toronto University, and currently is also wildly exploited at the University and at the ITC-irst of Trento. Tropos is an Agent oriented Software Methodology, based on the analysis of the actors, goals and relationships involved in a specific context. In our case, the context is defined within the communication of agrobiotechnology field. Tropos formalizes the results of a previous analysis with diagrams showing the most important relationships and needs to be considered in the final organization of the communication system. Starting from the study of the existing context of agrobiotechnology, we defined some categories of relevance in the debate (i.e. scientist, communicators, citizens, institutions, farmers etc.), and for each we defined specific interests and goals. The crucial aspect of the overall analysis is properly focusing the various actors, with the aim of enlightening behaviors and choices based on their identities, goals, and mutual dependencies. As an example, we pointed out a dependency between the “actor-Citizen” and the “actor-Insititution”, based on the claim for food security regulation of the first and the need of social and political consent of the second. Then, we pointed out some questions such as “Who is who?”, “What does one want to do?”, “Why?”, “How can we balance the different interests?”. Finally, all the relations we characterized, were modelized on the basis of the Tropos diagrams, that can progressively describe the actual state of our study, and help us in analyzing the complex system “agrobiotechnology”. In our diagrams we can distinguish needs and priorities, roles and dependencies of the various actors involved. We can compare these elements with the different possible communication tools (i.e. web sites, publications, etc.) in order to propose the most suitable communication solution which would satisfy the requirements previously defined and marked by the diagrams. This solution would result in a new technical actor to be involved in the overall organization (i.e. a technological system), with the role of supplying a significant contribution to the improvement of the actual communication system. The final result would be a best communication tool fitting the requests of each actor.

This research was supported by the project OSSERVA3 of the Autonomous Province of Trento.