Entwicklung eines semantisch operierenden Risikomanagement-Informationssystems am Beispiel der Europäischen Organisation für Kernforschung (CERN)

The term risk analysis summarises the systematic endeavour to identify and evaluate the risks within an organisation associated with projects and actions, and make it possible to regulate risks. Risk analyses are an integral component of risk management, and thus essential to consolidating safety. In that respect, the adequacy and reliability of the findings obtained by way of risk analysis directly depend on the availability and quality of the knowledge resources supplied organisationally. Access to knowledge relevant to making decisions is, however, hampered, in the real world of work through the impact of various informational barriers. Knowledge that is conducive to understanding and avoiding risks is frequently stored in very specialised database systems, the individual syntactic and semantic structures of which make it a very time-consuming and laborious operation to use such knowledge in the context of applications other than the one originally linked to the databases. In addition, a degree of ambiguity that accompanies the semi-structured nature of many documentation and reporting systems makes it difficult to process knowledge efficiently and in an automated way, for example in conjunction with search engines. This dissertation presents a contribution towards overcoming the existing knowledge barriers in risk management. To this end, the method of applying semantic methods of representing knowledge in the domain of risk analysis is proposed. The focus is on the semantic web, which - as an enhancement of the World Wide Web - makes it possible to explicitly grasp the meaning of knowledge contexts and reproduce this information. Should the present risk management be distinguished by document-based organisation and distribution of knowledge, the semantic web presents methods and tools which make it possible to put the knowledge directly to work on the data set level. Building on the latter, the concept of a semantically operating risk management information system is born. The core of such a blueprint is formed by the idea of not storing knowledge pertaining to risk analysis in a way that is based on traditional understanding, such as in the form of textual reports or relational database entries, but instead documenting it in the form of a constantly growing ontology. In order to guarantee access to the ontologically archived knowledge that is in line with practical requirements, the concept has been developed of a search engine that can be used, for any upcoming work processes, to check whether any identical or similar work processes in the past have given rise to critical incidents are documented. Risk managers are provided with a tool which makes it possible to access knowledge pertinent to taking decisions in a very precise manner and at short notice, and thus contributes towards the adequacy of the findings obtained by way of risk analysis being improved.