The Compliance Routing Problem

A Practitioner-Built Ontology for Multi-Agency EHS Navigation

Abstract

Environmental Health and Safety (EHS) practitioners perform a complex intellectual task that no existing ontology has formalized: routing a single workplace event through the overlapping jurisdictions of multiple independent federal agencies, where hazard type, operational context, and contextual conditions determine which regulatory frameworks activate and which obligations apply. This paper presents a formal OWL ontology for EHS compliance routing that captures this logic as a deterministic system. The ontology is structured around the Employee-Hazard bipolar model, mediated by the 5 E's of Safety and assessed through the ARECC decision-making framework. Its central contribution is the treatment of hazard type classification as a compliance activation mechanism rather than a descriptive label. A three-axis routing model (HazardType × ActionContext × ContextualCondition) produces deterministic regulatory obligation sets from classified inputs. CompoundHazardProfiles formalize the additive nature of compliance when multiple hazard types co-occur. Four regulatory modules extend the core model into EPCRA chemical inventory and TRI reporting, Clean Air Act Title V permitting, OSHA 300 recordkeeping, and incident management, wired together through an Establishment class that anchors facility-level obligations. Nine worked scenarios validate the routing logic across chemical, biological, electrical, mechanical, physical, ergonomic, and psychosocial hazard types. A designed Geo-Compliance Extension adds a fourth routing axis, FacilityJurisdiction, that layers state, county, and municipal regulatory obligations on top of the federal baseline without modifying the core ontology. The ontology provides a formal, transferable structure for multi-agency EHS compliance knowledge that currently exists only in the professional judgment of experienced practitioners.