The paper presents a new ontology-based approach to the elaboration and management of evidences prepared by developers for the IT security evaluation process according to the Common Criteria standard. The evidences concern the claimed EAL (Evaluation Assurance Level) for a developed IT product or system, called TOE (Target of Evaluation), and depend on the TOE features and its development environment. Evidences should be prepared for the broad range of IT products and systems requiring assurance. The selected issues concerning the author’s elaborated ontology are discussed, such as: ontology domain and scope definition, identification of terms within the domain, identification of the hierarchy of classes and their properties, creation of instances, and an ontology validation process. This work is aimed at the development of a prototype of a knowledge base representing patterns for evidences.

The concept of conscience is analyzed here in two different ways: the systematic and the historical-literary. As to the first, systematic perspective, I distinguish (in part 1) three levels of conscience and on every level I identify two opposite categories (conscience that is ‛individual’ versus ‛collective’; ‛emotional’ versus ‛intellectual’; ‛motivating ex ante’ versus ‛evaluating ex post’). In the second, historical-literary perspective, I analyze two literary cases of fictional characters usually thought of as being guided or affected by conscience. The first case is the ancient Greek tragedy and here I offer (in part 2) a comment on the Sophoclean Antigone and the Euripidean Orestes presenting them both as dramas that contain an exemplary formulation of the phenomenon of conscience. Although Antigone and Orestes express their main principles of action in apparently different words, I suggest (in part 3) the two poetical visions of conscience are equally based upon a highly emotional behavior called pathos by the Greek. Thereby I provide a reason, why ancient philosophers created a new concept of conscience intended as an alternative to the poetical vision of human behavior. The new philosophical concept of conscience was based upon an axiological behavior called ethos. I also coin (in part 4) a concept of the ‛community of conscience’ where I distinguish four ‛aspects of solidarity’ in conscience, namely, somebody’s own self, a group of significant persons, a group of the same moral principles, and a sameness of life. In the end I turn (in part 5) to a historical-literary case in Joseph Conrad’s last novel The Rover (1923), which provoked a lively discussion among Polish authors and seems useful as an illustration of several levels of ‛solidarity of conscience’.