Developing Hazard Ontology for supporting HACCP systems in food supply chains

This paper proposes an agent-based solution to support small and medium companies willing to implement a Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point system in food supply chains. The difference is made between private knowledge of the agents and public knowledge by exploiting the capabilities of distributed description logic. To support hazard based reasoning, two ontologies were created: the Hazard Ontology, encapsulating the possible hazards in a specific business domain and the HACCP ontology, defining the basic concepts of the HACCP standard. The framework is exemplified on a shrimp supply chain scenario.