Major accident prevention through applying safety knowledge management approach.

OBJECTIVE: Many scattered resources of knowledge are available to use for chemical accident prevention purposes. The common approach to management process safety, including using databases and referring to the available knowledge has some drawbacks. The main goal of this article was to devise a new emerged knowledge base (KB) for the chemical accident prevention domain.

DESIGN: The scattered sources of safety knowledge were identified and scanned. Then, the collected knowledge was formalized through a computerized program. The Protégé software was used to formalize and represent the stored safety knowledge.

RESULTS: The domain knowledge retrieved as well as data and information. This optimized approach improved safety and health knowledge management (KM) process and resolved some typical problems in the KM process.

CONCLUSION: Upgrading the traditional resources of safety databases into the KBs can improve the interaction between the users and knowledge repository.