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.

DOLCE, the first top-level (foundational) ontology to be axiomatized, has remained stable for twenty years and today is broadly used in a variety of domains. DOLCE is inspired by cognitive and linguistic considerations and aims to model a commonsense view of reality, like the one human beings exploit in everyday life in areas as diverse as socio-technical systems, manufacturing, financial transactions and cultural heritage. DOLCE clearly lists the ontological choices it is based upon, relies on philosophical principles, is richly formalized, and is built according to well-established ontological methodologies, e.g. OntoClean. Because of these features, it has inspired most of the existing top-level ontologies and has been used to develop or improve standards and public domain resources (e.g. CIDOC CRM, DBpedia and WordNet). Being a foundational ontology, DOLCE is not directly concerned with domain knowledge. Its purpose is to provide the general categories and relations needed to give a coherent view of reality, to integrate domain knowledge, and to mediate across domains. In these 20 years DOLCE has shown that applied ontologies can be stable and that interoperability across reference and domain ontologies is a reality. This paper briefly introduces the ontology and shows how to use it on a few modeling cases.

Example from the LOOM WORDNet Knowledge Base. At the beginning, we assumed that the hyponymy relation could simply be mapped onto the subsumption relation and that the synset notion could be mapped into the notion of concept. Both subsumption and concept have the usual description logic semantics (Woods and Schmolze 1992). LOOM WORDNET knowledge base are reported in table 1. Fig-ORDNET's noun top Under Territorial_-Dominion, we find Macao and Palestine together with Trust_Territory. The Trust_Territory synset, defined as "a dependent country, administered by a country under the supervision of United Nations," denotes a general kind of country rather than a specific country such as Macao or Palestine.

This report describes a new version of the OntoSpec methodology for ontology building. Defined by the LaRIA Knowledge Engineering Team (University of Picardie Jules Verne, Amiens, France), OntoSpec aims at helping builders to model ontological knowledge (upstream of formal representation). The methodology relies on a set of rigorously-defined modelling primitives and principles. Its application leads to the elaboration of a semi-informal ontology, which is independent of knowledge representation languages. We recently enriched the OntoSpec methodology by endowing it with a new resource, the DOLCE top-level ontology defined at the LOA (IST-CNR, Trento, Italy). The goal of this integration is to provide modellers with additional help in structuring application ontologies, while maintaining independence vis-à-vis formal representation languages. In this report, we first provide an overview of the OntoSpec methodology's general principles and then describe the DOLCE re-engineering process. A complete version of DOLCE-OS (i.e. a specification of DOLCE in the semi-informal OntoSpec language) is presented in an appendix.

Despite its original intended use, which was very different, WORDNET is used more and more today as an ontology, where the hyponym relation between word senses is interpreted as a subsumption relation between concepts. In this article, we discuss the general problems related to the semantic interpretation of WORDNET taxonomy in light of rigorous ontological principles inspired by the philosophical tradition. Then we introduce the DOLCE upper-level ontology, which is inspired by such principles but with a clear orientation toward language and cognition. We report the results of an experimental effort to align WORDNET's upper level with DOLCE. We suggest that such alignment could lead to an "ontologically sweetened" WORDNET, meant to be conceptually more rigorous, cognitively transparent, and efficiently exploitable in several applications.