Semantic Language and Tools for Reporting Human Factors Incidents

Incidents related to impaired human performance in space operations can be caused by environmental conditions, situational challenges, and operational deficiencies. Detecting, reporting, and correlating related incidents are key to preventing future incidents. NASA has made significant progress in standardizing the reporting of space incidents by developing electronic data entry and storage of information. While such information technology improves report consistency, incident data are not represented in a way that enables advanced computer-based reasoning about incidents. TRACLabs proposes to develop a human factors incident-reporting tool for authoring and utilizing human factors incident data. This project is innovative in combining semantic web technologies with automated assistive technologies to aid users in finding relationships among incidents. The semantic indexing provided by the use of incident reporting language permits more sophisticated search of archives. During Phase I we defined a semantic language for incident reporting in XML and designed a technology approach for authoring and utilizing incident reports represented in this language. In Phase II we will implement this software and evaluate its effectiveness for the space human factors community at JSC. At the end of Phase II, software for reporting space human factors incidents will be delivered to NASA.