In order to achieve the adequacy and reliability of the findings obtained via risk analysis, the Organisation needs to provide access to qualitative knowledge resources. Access to knowledge relevant to decision making is, however, hampered by various informational barriers. Overly specialized database systems are one of the informational barriers due to their individual syntactic and semantic structures. The usage of such knowledge in contexts other than the ones linked to the original databases becomes a time-consuming, laborious and error-prone operation. In addition, the semi-structured nature of many documentation and reporting systems may cause severe information ambiguity. This makes it difficult to process knowledge efficiently and in an automated way, for example in conjunction with search engines.
Against this background an HSE project group has been established on the subject of Safety information management.
The scope of its work is to improve the transparency and availability of CERN wide Safety information by applying semantic technology to the field of risk management. The development of a highly formalized Safety knowledge base, a so-called Safety Ontology, aims at tackling the underlying problem of gathering and classifying information whilst providing easy access to the stored knowledge about the different Safety items. The application that enables Safety experts to access the ontological knowledge base will be developed in the future.
Contact persons: Lars Aprin, Sven Langhoff