Chemical Accident Risk Assessment Thesaurus: Tool for Analyzing and Comparing Risk Assessment Processes. A. J. Ignatowski, Risk Management and Decision Processes Center, Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, PA; and I. Rosenthal, US Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board, Washington, DC
The OECD urged the development of a Thesaurus to improve the communication among the Member countries about risk assessments of hazardous installations. The difficulty is largely based on the fact that certain "terms of art" have different meanings in different countries and cultures. The result is the Chemical Accident Risk Assessment Thesaurus (CARAT) which is a database of laws, regulations, guidance standards and definitions of terms related to the risk assessment of accidental releases of chemicals from fixed installations. The database also contains information on the application of risk assessment methodologies to specific cases of potential chemical releases. The CARAT contains entries from international, national and regional agencies, chemical companies, and individuals. The entire system is accessible via the Internet. Retrieval of information from the CARAT is facilitated by five different searching tools: Two of them are designed to search the CARAT for its entries of laws/regulations, specific risk assessment cases (SRA), and risk assessment guidance documents (RAG). The other is designed to search for the definitions of terms related to risk assessment processes.
A third query tool is a "Comparison" facility that allows the user to compare the CARAT entries of laws/regulations, SRA, RAG, or definitions, in any combination.
The remaining two tools can perform searches by identifying entries that contain either certain combinations of hierarchical details, or of descriptor details. Both types can be conducted in Boolean ‘and/or’ mode.
The systematic decomposition of complicated processes into a hierarchical structure has suggested several auxiliary uses.
Work supported in part under the US Environmental Protection Agency’s Cooperative Agreement 821947.
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