# The Impact of the Human Factor on Communication During a Collision Situation in Maritime Navigation
## 2 Materials and Methods  
### Metaontology  
Several scientific publications have introduced metaontology [23; 24; 25; 26]. Generalizing some definitions and applications of metaontology, we can state that it contributes, inter alia, to the understanding of a given ontology and introduces a formal model for understanding a given ontology-based system. For the model to work comprehensively, we must define the rules and formalize and conceptualize the metaontology. The authors, for the purpose of their research, formulated an objective function containing lexical rules that will enable the improvement of maritime transport communication (M2M) systems.  
The ontology was built using the Protege program in English (maritime language required by the STCW Convention). It represents the structure of individual classes, instances, and entities. The communication ontology reflects the real-world processes  
Figure 1: Algorithm of the communication process.  
of acquiring and sharing information and the negotiations carried out between traffic participants. The navigation ontology contains navigational terms, which are its elements for creating messages. To send messages that are unambiguous, each type of message is assigned a category.  
The whole ontology has a tree structure (Figure 2), which naturally represents the hierarchy of the data (physical and abstract objects, concepts, etc.). Trees, on the other hand, make searching easier and faster and allow the sorted data to be easily operated on. Therefore, the latter method uses a data structure representing a mathematical tree, where ontology is the root of the tree, and the path is the sequence of edges connecting the tree.  
The developed communication ontology is universal enough to work with any navigation ontology: marine, aerial, submarine, etc.  
The ontology definition, formula, and its abstraction classes are discussed by the authors in previous works [1; 6; 27]. The set O--ontology--is systematic description of all concepts in a given domain, their features and attributes, and any relations between them.  
The authors' original objective function is presented below, which, in combination with the existing ontology, forms a metaontology applicable to automated communication. The objective function contains the message type and specific category and determines which connections are possible and which are rejected by the function.  
\[f_{O=m_{t}(A)\cdot\sum_{n=1}^{4}A_{n}+m_{t}(\;Q)\cdot\sum_{n=1}^{3}Q_{n}+m_{t} (T)\cdot\sum_{n=1}^{7}T_{n}}, \tag{1}\]  
Figure 2: A mathematical tree presenting a fragment of the navigation and communication ontologies.  
where:  
\(\mathrm{f_{O}}\)--objective function;  
\(\mathrm{m_{t}}\)--message type;  
\(\mathrm{m_{t}}\) (A)--answer;  
\(\mathrm{m_{t}}\) (Q)--question;  
\(\mathrm{m_{t}}\) (T)--tell;  
\(\mathrm{A_{n}}\)--n-th category from answer type;  
\(\mathrm{Q_{n}}\)--n-th category from question type;  
\(\mathrm{T_{n}}\)--n-th category from tell type.  
The communication ontology takes into account the real-world processes of acquiring and sharing information and negotiations carried out between traffic participants. The main classes in this ontology include the message structure, objects, time, and short phrases. The message structure consists of the body and the header. There are three message types: answer, question, and tell, which each have specific categories, e.g., question, demand, or request. Only the type 'answer' has one defined category, which informs the recipient that the message they sent was not understood, i.e., \"A_do not understand\".  
To make the message to be sent unambiguous, each type of message was assigned a specific category, as summarized in Table 3.  
The final research method used in this study was a survey carried out to verify the hypothesis. The description and conclusions are included in Section \"Survey Research\".