The key objective of Schlumberger’s new Corporate E&P Data
Store (EPDS) is to store data and interpretation results of known quality. Such
data is stored in the EPDS along with tags identifying its quality level as
well as why it was created. The philosophy behind the EPDS changes some of the
traditional ways of managing E&P data. EPDS The EPDS uses applications not only for interpretation, but
also for data quality control, cleanup and management. Quality assurance is
now performed from within the interpretation project. Quality assured data is
sent on to the EPDS for storage. This may be interpreted data, in the form of
horizons and maps, but also data such as well logs or seismic volumes, that
have gone through the QA/QC process. The EPDS will capture approval workflows
by tagging data items as they are edited and approved. Each data item has a
new set of configurable attribute-value pairs that can be tailored to a particular
company’s requirements. So that quality levels can be recorded as ‘unknown’
‘good’, ‘bad’ or ‘QC’d’ etc. Context – such as the source of data (e.g. contractor
name) can be tagged. The client-defined system is dynamic and can evolve with
time making the EPDS an information data store rather than a database. Federator The underlying database is ‘POSC-based’. Access is performed
at the ‘conceptual level’ using the new Schlumberger EPDS Federator. The Federator
makes the EPDS database-independent. This will allow Schlumberger to plug into
existing Finder installations with the same technology. Not Open Spirit! However, the Federator, even though it uses business objects,
is not OpenSpirit. OpenSpirit reads and writes data to applications for interoperability.
The EPDS is focused on data management, on ‘rich data objects’ with the possibility
of ‘fixing’ data. The EPDS is furthermore designed to be configurable by the
end users (or at least by their programmers). One objective of the Statoil CDS
project is to be able to define new business objects, without coding, in less
than 100 hours. The Federator has already been demonstrated and used to manage
data in Finder, OpenWorks, GeoFrame and the CDS. The EPDS will be productized
once Schlumberger has met its obligations to Statoil. This article originally appeared in Oil IT Journal 2001 Issue # 12. For more information or to comment on this topic email here. This recent, 402
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