A Review of Ontology-Based Safety Management in Construction

The construction industry is one of the most dangerous industries in terms of safety performance, with practitioners and experts actively developing various solutions to reduce accident frequency and severity. However, accident information is collected in a wide range of formats by various elements in the construction industry, leading to interoperability issues and poor productivity due to the difficulties of sharing and reusing information. To improve the management of various types of safety management (SM) records in the construction industry, practitioners and researchers have adopted ontological methods. This paper summarizes the SM trends in construction management, along with gaps and opportunities for future work. A data processing framework is developed with a phase research for objective and subjective topic analysis from a collection of articles from 2012–2022 on topics relevant to the use of ontology in SM. The analysis focuses on the ontological life cycle (development, integration, and application), revealing an increasing trend of ontology-based SM (ObSM) research in the SM maintenance phase. Increasing case size and system automation is needed for future ontology-based SM optimization. The findings of the study will help to gain a thorough knowledge of ObSM, which will increase interest in effectiveness and the use of engineering and analytical techniques in SM.