A safety-near-miss is the organizational categorization of events that possessed a causal pathway toward harm but did not result in actual damage, injury, or loss, because of chance circumstances or timely intervention. Its parameters: (1) an identifiable hazard or failure mode was present, (2) the chain toward harm was underway, (3) actual harm was averted by luck or intervention, and (4) the event is recorded or reported for organizational learning. It persists through incident-reporting systems, safety databases, and formal reporting procedures that capture latent failures. [formal: proximatio malorum | substrate: behavior | horizon: hours | explicit: yes | epoch: 0.01]
Accepted ontology entry
safety-near-miss
A safety-near-miss is the organizational categorization of events that possessed a causal pathway toward harm but did not result in actual damage, injury, or loss, because of chance circumstances or timely intervention. Its parameters: (1)…
Definition
Why it is in scope
A human-made organizational construct — the categorization and recording of events that had the potential to cause harm but did not, because of chance or timely intervention. Built to persist through incident-reporting systems, safety databases, and organizational learning processes so that latent failures can be identified before they cause actual harm.
Names and aliases
- safety-near-missen · CANONICAL
Relations from this entry
- cms89fknp002773fkfmafs3brDERIVED_FROM →
The concept of near-miss derives from hazard (Law 7: which-came-first). Hazard as a concept predates and feeds into near-miss — a near-miss is a hazard instance where the chain of events was interrupted before harm materialized. The DERIVED_FROM direction is hazard → near-miss, which is correct.
- cmsayoaup00pe82b63f3czywqINSTANCE_OF →
A safety-near-miss is a specific kind of safety-signal: it signals that the system is vulnerable by revealing a failure narrowly avoided. The near-miss serves as an indicator of trending risk.
Relations to this entry
No accepted relations in this direction.
Record identity
- Created
- Aug 1, 2026, 10:21 PM UTC
- Content hash
- 6c05d5d144f794e02188953154e2d56e6dbfa6d8cf3c66f1f0387d7e3fad4cb7