Abstract
A basic requirement for developing adequate and cost-effective safety measures is a good understanding of hazards and accident causation mechanisms. There is still a lack of such information for preventive analysis. One of the problems is associated with a weak conceptual framework for expressing human and organisational error (HOE). Most accident documentation formats are further unable to express the events relative to the time-dimension. The paper discusses some of the HOE taxonomies which have been put forward in recent years. It is suggested that accident reporting should be based on known methods from risk analysis such as networking of events and fault tree analysis. (A)