Designing Information Visualization for Incident Databases

摘要

Incident reporting is an important means of communicating information about potenitial hazards and failure in safety critical systems. Most existing reporting schemes rely upon dat; bases to manage information about adverse occurrences (ref. 15). This provides important benefits. Sta istical summaries can be produced to identify past trends and patterns in data sets. Most reporting systems do not exploit advanced information visualization. In consequence, it can be difficult for engineers an i safety managers to identify some of the trends that exist in incident data. This paper presents a nove visualization for querying Her Majesty's Railway Inspectorate reports about 'Signals Passed at Danger' This data was chosen because these incidents have led to recent accidents in the UK. The visualization tool uses Dynamic Querying (ref. 19) and a Starfield Display (ref. 1). These techniques were designed to support the presentation of large scientific and commercial datasets. They have not previously been used to support the presentation and analysis of safety-related information. The paper will discuss the organisational context in which such a system might be used, show ng how it would support a safety manager's workflow. It is argued that information visualization can in prove the process of identifying trends and features in a database of incident reports.