Abstract
This paper is concerned with accessing information from accident databases. It discusses the limitation of current accident databases and focuses on the issue of finding and ranking of information that relates to a query. A user or system initiates an interaction with a database by specifying what is of interest in the form of a query. The query does not have to be treated as a precise description of what is of interest, but a vague or “fuzzy” one. Fuzzy database techniques make it possible to exploit all available information by returning not only items that match the query exactly, but also items that bear some relation to the query.
A domain model for accident reports in the process industries was developed. It consists of four classification hierarchies for the attributesoperation , equipment, cause and consequence. A common approach for assessing how closely two terms are related is based on the number of links between the two terms on a hierarchy. This approach is not appropriate for the accident database domain. Instead, the relationship between any two nodes on a hierarchy is classified into four different types. Methods for determining similarities for the different types of relationships are discussed and have been implemented in an accident database. The ranking of the retrieved information is much more satisfactory then the “distance” based approach.
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Chung, P., Jefferson, M. A Fuzzy Approach to Accessing Accident Databases. Applied Intelligence 9, 129–137 (1998). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1008263918762
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1008263918762