In his keynote address to the Standards Leadership Council, Total Group CTO Jean-Francois Minster described a ‘new world’ of numerical data, connected objects, gigaflop supercomputers and exabytes of new data per year. The changes are impacting E&P but also sales and marketing where, ‘even Amazon sells lube oil!’ Opportunities abound—from digital asset management, operations and in drilling automation. A common language is needed to combine different data sources sharing definitions and formats. External stakeholders increasingly expect transparency and if our terms are fuzzy this creates suspicion in the public mind. Data has a long lifetime and formats need to ‘stay alive’ for years. Collaborating on data and formats is not easy—there is inertia in the installed base! Even in Total, data formats differ from one unit to another. Total welcomes the efforts of the SLC to collaborate on this ‘long term issue.’
PPDM Association CEO Trudy Curtis welcomed a new SLC member, the Object Management Group (OMG) and introduced a nice marketing retrofit to Energistics’ standards, now categorized as supporting ‘data in motion’ (presumably leaving PPDM with ‘data at rest’). Curtis asked rhetorically, ‘how come there are so many standards?’ and proposed a roadmap of tactical projects like PPDM to Witsml mapping and the units of measure standardization initiative. A white paper covering information and awareness of standards bodies is in preparation.
BP’s Mark Brunton observed that although upstream digital technology is now mature, there remain limitations on data sharing. Integrated standards are seen as essential to BP’s redefined 21st century digital oilfield. BP is working to make global data available centrally and to offer a standard corporate look and feel so that engineers can operate from any location.
The SLC needs to be more than a forum for conversation—it needs to act in the interests of industry. To achieve this the it needs a governance framework and a ‘clear agenda, setting out how the individual standards come together,’ with direction from owner operators.
OMG CEO Richard Soley set out his storefront extolling the merits of UML as the ‘way forward.’ OMG’s modeling tools are graphical, code and text is deprecated. The OMG’s business process modeling notation got a plug as did the meta object facility. The consortium for software quality also ran as did the cloud standards customer council.
Energistics CEO Jerry Hubbard adds the following. ‘Our Forums in Paris and Houston attracted more than 80 delegates each. Our strategic planning sessions have focused on global standards adoption, initiating collaborative projects between standards rather than simply identifying intersection points. The SLC is to initiate operators and adoption advisory groups to provide strategic guidance and outreach. We are also holding an event in Utrecht just prior to Intelligent Energy.’ More from Energistics.
This article originally appeared in Oil IT Journal 2014 Issue # 3.
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