Elsewhere in this issue you will find some explanation of how a data modeling tool borrowed from the Product Data Management arena - the Express modeling language - was selected by POSC as the tool of choice for E&P modeling. It was thus fairly natural then for POSC to team up later and work with the Norwegian offshore construction industry on the development of a PDM like extension to Epicentre to cover platform building and the like.
Unified?
The initial goal has been described as an attempt to find the Grand Unified Theory of data modeling, or alternatively to build the "mother of all data models". Things did not quite go according to plan, and the history is obscured by marketing claims. What seems to have happened is that first there was CAESAR, using ISO-STEP (more Express) to define their data structures, then along came POSC and said how about tying this all in to Epicentre? So POSC/CAESAR was formed to do just that, but it turned out that this was too hard and CAESAR decided to carry on as before, except that it is now called POSC/CAESAR anyhow. The only losers are people who believed that this one was going to fly and actually went to the trouble of coding some of the Epicentre extensions which were to encroach on the CAESAR part. They have been left out in the cold. Viewed from the E&P side of the equation the grass does look greener on the construction side of the fence. This could be just an observation, or it may relate to the appropriateness of Express in describing construction objects over E&P data structures.
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