SEG Standards committee report (December 1997)

PDM reports on the Society of Exploration Geophysicists’ (SEG) Technical Standards Committee’s recent meeting.

The SEG has (at last) begun to publish their standards on the website (http://www.seg.org). There you will find the definitive specs for SEG D, Record Oriented Data Encapsulation Format (RODE), Shell processing support format for land 3-D surveys and the proposed polarity convention for Vibroseis. Current activity for the standards committee includes the Ancillary Data Standard (ADS), a collaboration between the SEG and United Kingdom Offshore Operators Association intended to provide a uniform method of recording all ancillary field data. The ancillary data types may be extended to include standard names for processing sequences and tape/volume cataloguing. This subcommittee is in the process of finalizing the specification, and would welcome input from interested parties asap. A standard means of mapping the SEG seismic tape standards to CD-ROM is also underway - which may be generalized to all byte-stream media. While RODE can do this and more, there is a consensus that there is a place for a simpler mapping of tape to disk type formats than RODE.

SEGD Rev 2 has been out for around a year now with little or no adoption as yet. The committee recommends a push from the client side as necessary to help take-up. The main advantage of Rev 2 is the ability to write a standard tape label. This has advantages in the context of high density media, where a tape label should allow content identification in seconds rather than minutes or even hours of spinning. The RODE format was criticized for its total flexibility, and it has been suggested that there should be a more standard manner of writing RODE that could be endorsed by the SEG. Proposals for this are to be published to the website for comments.