Towards a Common Safety Ontology for Automobiles and Railway Vehicles

Automobiles and railway vehicles have their specific safety standards, respectively. Still, they are both land vehicles and thus share a large set of common hazards and accident types. This calls for a common safety ontology covering both domains. Apart from many commonalities, we found some important differences between safety standards of these domains, in particular between ISO 26262, EN 50126 and SIRF (the German Standard for railway vehicles). Based on their respective glossaries, we attempted to resolve certain differences. This led us to a common set of formalized concepts and their relations. We consider this as an important step towards a common ontology for automobiles and railway vehicles. Such an ontology should facilitate the reuse of hazard and risk analyses from one domain to the other, and it should have important application areas.