Developing an ontological explosion knowledge base for business continuity planning purposes

Industrial accidents are among the most known challenges to business continuity. Many organisations have lost their reputation following devastating accidents. To manage the risks of such accidents, it is necessary to accumulate sufficient knowledge regarding their roots, causes and preventive techniques. The required knowledge might be obtained through various approaches, including databases. Unfortunately, many databases are hampered by (among other things) static data presentations, a lack of semantic features, and the inability to present accident knowledge as discrete domains. This paper proposes the use of Protégé software to develop a knowledge base for the domain of explosion accidents. Such a structure has a higher capability to improve information retrieval compared with common accident databases. To accomplish this goal, a knowledge management process model was followed. The ontological explosion knowledge base (EKB) was built for further applications, including process accident knowledge retrieval and risk management. The paper will show how the EKB has a semantic feature that enables users to overcome some of the search constraints of existing accident databases.