Towards Ontology-Based Safety Information Management in the Aviation Industry

Aviation is a high risk industry where safety management is mandatory for organizations. On a global scale, safety management is hierarchical, i.e. national authorities manage safety of the sector, controlling organizations which in turn manage safety of their operations, as well as the safety of their organizational units. It is apparent that safety information management is a key factor to the success of safety management. Improving safety information management in aviation can be achieved by the systematic documentation of safety information and its seamless sharing vertically as well as horizontally through the management hierarchy. Despite attempts to tackle this problem, the industry still suffers from information management issues, e.g. usage of terminologically incompatible safety management frameworks. As a result diverse information repositories, e.g. investigation reports, safety recommendations, or audit reports managed by these frameworks, cannot be efficiently explored and compared. We apply Linked Data principles, e.g. searchability and explorability based on dataset descriptors, to help solving the problem. In this work we propose an ontology-based safety information management for the aviation industry. To achieve this we develop the Aviation Safety Ontology that is modular and covers the contexts of the organization types aerodrome, airline, air traffic management, maintenance and the state civil aviation authority. We test the appropriateness of the proposed ontology by representing safety data in terms of the ontology.