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In Risk Management, security issues arise from complex relations among objects and agents, their capabilities and vulnerabilities, the events they are involved in, and the value and risk they ensue to the stakeholders at hand. Further, there are patterns involving these relations that crosscut many domains, ranging from information security to public safety. Understanding and forming a shared conceptualization and vocabulary about these notions and their relations is fundamental for modeling the corresponding scenarios, so that proper security countermeasures can be devised. Ontologies are instruments developed to address these conceptual clarification and terminological systematization issues. Over the years, several ontologies have been proposed in Risk Management and Security Engineering. However, as shown in recent literature, they fall short in many respects, including generality and expressivity -the latter impacting on their interoperability with related models. We propose a Reference Ontology for Security Engineering (ROSE) from a Risk Treatment perspective. Our proposal leverages on two existing Reference Ontologies: the Common Ontology of Value and Risk and a Reference Ontology of Prevention, both of which are grounded on the Unified Foundational Ontology (UFO). ROSE is employed for modeling and analysing some cases, in particular providing clarification to the semantically overloaded notion of Security Mechanism.

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The problem of definition of the concept of law or at least the description of features of legal phenomenon presents variation about the implications of its solution and about the worries around it. The forms of this problem I am interested in are related to ontology and epistemology in legal philosophy: ‘What is the law?’ as (1) a question about the definition of the essence of law and (2) about the definition of a specific object of investigation for sciences about the supposed legal phenomenon – philosophy of law, legal theory, and science of law, for instance. Challenging its premises and trying to avoid both the ontological problem and epistemological problem, I propose a change of perspective from pragmatic concerns what I call the “manager's point of view”: a vision of who should manage the finite economic resources to finance scientific activity in the area of law. I argue that, starting from there, the problem of defining the concept of law as an ontological problem and as a epistemological problem is an unnecessary problem whose solution is useless to advance research in the field of law. I propose a reorientation of the controversy that has implications on how to see the researches and the education in this field.