Semantic annotation of product safety information

Due to an increasing number of regulatory restrictions and a rising product complexity, compliance and safety management have become key issues for enterprises today. Besides the requirements to build safe products, documentation of safety compliance and in-use restrictions have to be archived and published by law. Some research projects have already tackled the problem of visually identifying hazards zones within virtual environments. Other approaches deal with the formal analysis of safety issues in expert systems for conformity checks. What is still missing is the bridge between visual representation and documentation. The virtual reality (VR) approaches do not support storage and processing of identified hazards, furthermore 3D models have to be prepared and converted to VR formats, which does not allow “online” analysis. Expert systems only cover an abstract, textual definition of hazard zones, which separates the safety domain from design. This paper describes a framework for “product safety information” to identify, track and document hazards and protective measures throughout the product life cycle. The underlying data model supports integration of geometric references into the safety information, similar to the use of product manufacturing information like GD&T.