Investigation Organizer: the development and testing of a Web-based tool to support mishap investigations

Abstract

InvestigationOrganizer (IO) is a collaborative web-based system designed to support the conduct of mishap investigations. IO provides a common repository for a wide range of mishap related information, and allows investigators to make explicit, shared, and meaningful links between evidence, causal models, findings and recommendations. It integrates the functionality of a database, a common document repository, a semantic knowledge network, a rule-based inference engine, and causal modeling and visualization. Thus far, IO has been used to support four mishap investigations within NASA, ranging from a small property damage case to the loss of the Space Shuttle Columbia. This paper describes how the functionality of IO supports mishap investigations and the lessons learned from the experience of supporting two of the NASA mishap investigations: the Columbia Accident Investigation and the CONTOUR Loss Investigation. 12 TABLE OF CONTENTS 1. THE NEED FOR INVESTIGATION SUPPORT TOOLS ........ 1 2. DESCRIPTION OF INVESTIGATIONORGANIZER FUNCTIONALITY.

Supporting Knowledge Transfer through Decomposable Reasoning Artifacts

“…Moreover, calls for a "Pragmatic Web" (that explicitly enables communities to test, refine, and implement emergent, experience-based, solutions) counterbalance the purely deductive nature of much contemporary knowledge representation (such as in ontologies for the Semantic Web) [22]. Empirical studies of collaborative inquiry in investigative settings, notably [23], have indicated user desire for (a) the ability to link information artifacts to the reasoning processes in which they figure, as an aid to keeping a community informed about the state of its knowledge, (b) the ability to generate "big picture" reports, and (c) minimizing ontological complexity. Some extant tools accomplish a few of these objectives: [24] provides a utility for describing observations, beliefs, and uncertainty associated with online documents using semi-formal semantic markup; [25] enables communication of user-created and automatically generated "knowledge maps" in document analysis applications.…”

The mediator authorization-security model for heterogeneous semantic knowledge bases

“…To illustrate the procedures of the model, we use a portion of the NASA Investigation Organizer's (IO) ontology, which is designed to rectify any mishap in the conducting of investigations [24]. IO offers a common repository for a broad assortment of mishaprelated data.…”

A comparison of object-triple mapping libraries

“…A subset of the described functionality has been implemented in the SISel system [5]. Another system with related functionality aimed at the spacecraft accident investigation domain was built at NASA by Carvalho et al [6,7].…”