The potential of ontology for safety and risk analysis

Ontology is one of the enablers of the Big Data Risk Analysis project (BDRA). Ontology is the systematic classification of domain knowledge that supports the use of different databases in a meaningful way. This pa-per describes the background of ontologies and use cases within the BDRA research programme. Primarily, they are useful for search engines, text analysis and data-linkage and re-use. Also, the analysis of ontologies offers a shimmer into a new way of working in science itself.