EXTRACTING RISK INFORMATION

Customer
Food company

Goal
Remove the need for manual work by automatically gathering and harmonizing text-
based risk information.

Description
A Safety Data Sheets (SDS) is a standardized document by which chemical
manufacturers communicate chemical’s hazard information to chemical handlers.
SDS typically contain chemical properties, health and environmental hazards,
protective measures, as well as safety precautions for storing, handling, and
transporting chemicals. Chemical handlers extract information from SDS just reading
the section of interest, but this “manual” workflow is not effective when the Health,
Safety & Environment (HSE) manager would like to gather hazards information
about all chemicals used in the company.
With the use of KNIME analytics platform and a mixture of text mining and string manipulation it was possible:
– To harmonize and gather information from a series of SDS extracting every
risk phrase reported
– To have a global output partitioned according to dangerousness of substances
and directly downloadable by the user
– To save significant time of repetitive operations (from about two minutes of a
manual extraction to few seconds for each SDS)