Ontological analysis of proactive life event services
Kuldar Taveter
TL;DR
The paper addresses the need for precise ontological definitions of life events and proactive public services to enable robust e-government architectures. It develops an ontological metamodel for proactive life event services, extending prior work by incorporating universals and particulars, endurants and perdurants, states and events, and deontic assignments, and linking these to public service concepts. It analyzes how life events trigger service initialization processing through reaction rules and opt-out considerations, and clarifies the relationship between the ontological Life Event and CPSV-AP's Life Event. The findings highlight Estonia's legislative framework as a concrete instantiation and advocate for ontological grounding to support interoperability and standardization across the EU.
Abstract
Life event service is a direct digital public service provided jointly by several governmental institutions so that a person can fulfill all the obligations and use all the rights that arise due to a particular event or situation in personal life. Life event service consolidates several public services related to the same life event into one service for the service consumer. This paper presents an ontological analysis of life event services, which is based on the works by Guarino, Guizzardi, Nardi, Wagner, and others. The purpose of the ontological analysis is to understand the meanings of life event, proactive public service based on life event, and other related notions. This kind of ontological analysis is crucial because for implementing the hardware and software architectures of e-government and digital public services, it is essential to agree upon the precise meanings of the underlying terms.