An Ontological and Semantic Foundation for Safety and Security Science

Abstract

When discussing the concepts of risk, safety, and security, people have an intuitive understanding of what these concepts mean, and, to a certain level, this understanding is universal. However, when delving into the real meaning of these concepts, one is likely to fall into semantic debates and ontological discussions. In industrial parks, it is important that (risk) managers from different companies, belonging to one and the same park, have the same understanding of the concepts of risk, safety, and security. It is even important that all companies in all industrial parks share a common understanding regarding these issues. As such, this paper explores the similarities and differences behind the perceptions of these concepts, to come to a fundamental understanding of risk, safety, and security, proposing a semantic and ontological ground for safety and security science, based on an etymological and etiological study of the concepts of risk and safety. The foundation has been induced by the semantics used in the ISO 31000 risk management guidance standard. Hence, this article proposes a coherent, standardized set of concepts and definitions with a focus on the notion “objectives” that can be used as an ontological foundation for safety and security science, linking “objectives” with the concepts of safety, security, risk, performance and also failure and success, theoretically allowing for an increasingly more precise understanding and measurement of (un)safety across the whole range of individuals, sectors and organizations, or even society as a whole.

Safety Science, a Systems Thinking Perspective: From Events to Mental Models and Sustainable Safety

“…Safety should in the first place be concerned with making sure these valuable, needed and important objectives are pursued, achieved and secured. It is making certain that excellent performance is attained when pursuing and safeguarding objectives, and that health and wellbeing will be assured in all circumstances [45]. Hollnagel [44] refers to this as Safety I and Safety II, where Safety I is the traditional approach of avoiding losses due to the factors negatively affecting objectives.…”

“…In our view, this is how safety and safety science should evolve. It is about both the absence of losses (low unsafety), the presence of pursued, achieved and safeguarded objectives (high safety) [45] and the mental models that are at the genesis of the systems that generate wanted and/or undesirable outcomes.…”

“…As the history of safety science shows [45], in one's mind, connections are easily made between both sides of the risk and safety graph. Scholars pursue ways to improve safety but they have always been concerned with the reduction of unsafety.…”

“…Risk, safety and performance are related to objectives (what is valuable and valued by someone) at a given time. For risk, this lies in the future, for safety it is about a present situation and performance is about what has already happened and lies in the past [45].…”

“…In that way, a basic level of safety at the component level is established. Running a risk (surface b.y in Figure 3) is the cost or losses likely to be incurred when pursuing an objective, which can be considered a basic level of unsafety [45]. The establishment of these basic levels of safety and unsafety provides a starting point allowing to identify risk sources and their effects-both positive and negative-related to this specific objective.…”