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Semantic Variation in Hazard Terminology across Safety Standards

Fulltext:


Authors:

Thorvaldur Jochumsson, Kristina Lundqvist

Publication Type:

Report

Abstract

Safety standards introduce key hazard-related terminology through natural language that is inherently context-dependent and prone to ambiguities and inconsistencies affecting knowledge representation, requirements engineering, semantic interoperability, and reasoning.To provide a deeper understanding of these issues and their origin, this paper presents an exploratory analysis of hazard-related terminology in IEC61508, identifying semantic variation and alternative conceptual representations. The analysis is extended to the hydrogen specification ISO15916 as a representative domain-specific standardisation effort, examining how these issues are reflected at the domain level.The study provides insights into how hazard-related concepts are represented and how semantic variation arises across IEC61508 and ISO15916. The results show that weak conceptual commitment and vagueness in generic hazard terminology are associated with semantic variation and contribute to ambiguities and inconsistencies in knowledge representation across the standards. These findings suggest that current approaches to hazard-related representation in safety standardisation lack sufficient conceptual clarity and motivate strengthened conceptualisation, explicit conceptual structures, and clearer alignment between generic and domain-specific safety standards.

Bibtex

@techreport{Jochumsson7452,
author = {Thorvaldur Jochumsson and Kristina Lundqvist},
title = {Semantic Variation in Hazard Terminology across Safety Standards},
month = {September},
year = {2026},
url = {http://www.es.mdu.se/publications/7452-}
}