PGS’ new E&P portal - www.surfandconnect.com
is due to go live in April and will offer secure, on-line data and software e-commerce. The portal will offer data sales and web-hosted application service provision to “reduce the total cost of ownership of desktop systems through web based deployment and maintenance of software.”
PUG
Vince Kowalski of PGS Data Management and James Maupin of Modis (now Idea Integrators) speaking at last month’s ESRI PUG decribed how they planned to deploy GIS-based e-commerce over the Internet. PGS’ first moved into the GIS browser marketplace with the acquisition of IBM’s E&P software including PetroBank, the Norwegian log and seismic database deploying POSC’s Epicentre and Oracle’s SDO.
surfer
The front end to Petrobank evolved into the Surf and Connect product (also known as “Surfer”) offering GIS-based data browsing and selection. Surfer started out as a vanilla ArcView development with subsequent extensions for query building and area of interest. To interface these Java developments with ArcView, PGS built a JARVIS middleware layer between JAVA and ArcView. JARVIS transfers Java socket messages to ArcView via a remote procedure call (RPC). The query builder and area of interest modules communicate with Java through TCP/IP sockets which pass the data on to ArcView.
JARVIS
The PetroBank server now incorporates ESRI’s Spatial Data Engine (SDE) and uses a CORBA SDE Server connected to a second server hosting a JAVA Remote Method Invocation - based application using IIOP. The second server was needed because CORBA does not, at present, work with firewalls. However OMG is working to rectify this.
This article originally appeared in Oil IT Journal 2000 Issue # 3.
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