Concepts and Relationships in Safety and Security Ontologies: A Comparative Study

Safety and security ontologies quickly become essential support for integrating heterogeneous knowledge from various sources. Today, there is little standardization of ontologies and almost no discussion of how to compare concepts and their relationships, establish a general approach to create relationships or model them in general. However, concepts with similar names are not semantically similar or compatible in some cases. In this case, the problem of correspondence arises among the concepts and relationships found in the ontologies. To solve this problem, a comparison between the Hazard Ontology (HO) and the Combined Security Ontology (CSO) is proposed, in which the value of equivalence between their concepts and their relationships was extracted and analyzed. Although the HO covers the concepts related to the safety domain and the CSO includes security-related concepts, both are based on the Unified Foundational Ontology (UFO). For this study, HO and CSO were compared, and the results were summarized in the form of comparison tables. Our main contribution involves the comparisons among the concepts in HO and CSO to identify equivalences and differences between the two. Due to the increasing number of ontologies, their mapping, merging, and alignment are primary challenges in bridging the gaps that exist between the safety and security domains.