This human factors incident reporting tool for authoring and using human factors incident data combines semantic Web technologies with automated assistive technologies to aid users in finding relationships among incidents. The semantic indexing provided by the use of incident reporting language permits more sophisticated search of archives. During Phase I of this project, a semantic language for incident reporting in XML was defined, and a technology approach was designed for authoring and using incident reports represented in this language. In Phase II, this software was implemented and its effectiveness evaluated for the space human factors community at JSC.

The innovators identified ontologies for human factors incident reporting for use when documenting an incident in the Incident Representation Language. The use of such ontologies will ensure consistent vocabulary when reporting incidents, will provide for semantic indexing of incident archives, and will support comparing incidents with varying degrees of match. This approach supports linking other sources of information into the report, including audio files, images, and video.

This work was done by Debra Schreckenghost and Jeremy Norman of TRACLabs for Johnson Space Center. MSC-25200-1