Ontological analysis of proactive life event services
This work addresses the need for precise terminology in e-government systems to facilitate hardware and software development, but it is incremental as it builds on existing ontological works.
The paper tackles the problem of defining key concepts for digital public services by conducting an ontological analysis of life event services, resulting in a framework to clarify terms like 'life event' and 'proactive public service' for implementation purposes.
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.