The use of ontologies for enhancing the use of accident information

Safety engineering is multi-disciplinary in nature, requiring many kinds of information. Particularly, the identification of accident scenarios and the reuse of accident information can be benefited from the computational integration of different sources of information. However, enabling software tools to share, exchange and search information in this area is difficult due to the lack of an unambiguous knowledge representation. Ontologies are formal models based on mathematical logic that describe classes of things and their relations and can facilitate the sharing and exchange of accident scenarios and bring with them the support of automated reasoning which facilitates the location of information of past accidents. This paper discusses the use of ontologies (and the ISO 15926 in particular) for capturing descriptions of accidents and locating them. (C) 2012 The Institution of Chemical Engineers. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.