International audienceThe capacity to manage risks and maintain industrial safety is largely based on the capacity of various actors to acquire, maintain and share knowledge on a large variety of subjects. The actors are, of course, the plant operator but also the employees, the competent authorities, the external maintenance teams or internal or external experts in charge of risk assessment and design of risk management. The knowledge ranges from the regulatory framework to the details of a machine or a process but also includes the general knowledge about the industrial safety, the hazardous phenomena, or the properties of the substances. Part of this knowledge is also largely tacit. It lies in the brain of the scientific experts or the employees who are able to make the connection between apparently disconnected pieces of knowledge. Detecting, extracting, maintaining and communicating this knowledge are typical knowledge management activities. The authors have been developing for several years knowledge access tools dedicated to the communication of generic knowledge on the industrial safety. The structure and content of this system is described in the present paper. New developments are now in progress to improve the capacity to retrieve and exploit this knowledge as well as to facilitate the management of specific knowledge. These developments are based on an ontology of industrial safety. The basic principles for developing and using ontologies are recalled. The process for building such an ontology in the industrial safety domain is then described as well as its use for indexing and searching documents in an industrial safety web platform. Other applications of this ontology are also briefly presente
