Standards stuff

Energistics Online, IOGP USBL pilot, OGC MapML, OMG/OPC map between DDS and OPC-UA, W3C DCAT dataset exchange/Web of Things, SEC’s Bauguess on machine readability, XBRL ruleset for filing validation/Arelle open source EDGAR front end.

Energistics, the upstream oil and gas standards body, has added ‘Energistics Online’ to its website, an interactive set of documentation covering its data-transfer standards and components of the Common Technical Architecture. Users can also download the whole resource for use offline.

The IOGP’s Geomatics Committee is to develop common industry specification for the calibration and verification of ultra-short base line positioning systems. This pilot project will also assess the need for calibration standards for other offshore survey systems such as multibeam echosounders, heading sensors and motion reference units.

OGC, the Open Geospatial Consortium is investigating MapML (map markup language) in its innovation program. Although there has been a push for an open spatial data infrastructure and much data is already available on the web, currently access to such resources requires specialized client software. Enter MapML, an HTML-like hypertext format for interactive map content. OGC and W3C have launched a ‘Maps for HTML’ community group with native browser support for MapML as the ‘ultimate goal.’

Object Management Group has published a draft specification to link its IoT DDS connectivity standards with the OPC’s Unified Architecture, OPC-UA. While there are solutions that bridge between DDS and OPC UA, these are based on custom mappings and cannot be relied to work across vendors and products. The new specification overcomes this situation by defining a standard, vendor-independent, configurable gateway that enables interoperability and information exchange between systems that use DDS and systems that use OPC UA.

New resources on the Pipeline Open Data Consortium’s website explain PODS Next Gen/7.0 in ten FAQs along with a ‘technical deep dive’ into Next Gen. PODS also reports progress on its In line and offline inspection data management project. The project is to capture ILI historical data in a relational or geodatabase implementation of the PODS 7.0 schema.

The W3C’s Dataset Exchange Working Group has published a first public working draft of DCAT, its data catalog vocabulary, an RDF vocabulary for interoperability between data catalogs on the Web. W3C has also issued its ‘Web of Things’ specification, its vision for the IoT.

In a recent presentation, the SEC’s Scott Bauguess stressed the importance for the agency and its user community of machine readable financial reports. The SEC’s EDGAR database serves some 1.5 billion documents filed by public companies with the SEC each year. Today, 85% of the downloads are made by ‘bots,’ not humans. The Commission is currently applying machine learning methods to detect potential market misconduct. Many of the methods are open source and easy to implement for those trained in data science. Bauguess opined ‘There is no need to rely on proprietary solutions, captive vendors, or complicated third-party support for data analytic success. This freedom has fueled the rapid innovation at the SEC, and I suspect also among your organizations.’ A recently proposed rule will mandate reporting companies to file in Inline XBRL, a protocol that supports both human and machine readability.

The XBRL US Data Quality Committee (DQC) has approved its 6th ‘ruleset’ for validating filings prepared using the US GAAP Financial Reporting Taxonomy and the IFRS Taxonomy. The rules, along with Arelle, a free open source client for the SEC’s EDGAR data, are available on GitHub.

This article originally appeared in Oil IT Journal 2018 Issue # 3.

For more information or to comment on this topic email here.