Project Banff – multi-source data browsing from Landmark (December 1998)

A Landmark initiative – codename'Project Banff' is designed to allow data from diverse sources to be viewed witha single ArcView-based browser.

PDM (Vol. 1 N° 5) has described Calgary, with its close-knit, competitive E&P community and high-performance communications as the "E&P data capital of the world". Landmark considers that the Calgary marketplace is an excellent test-bed for their new multi data source browser code-named "Project Banff". The idea is to provide a single viewer for the many Calgary-based data sources, for a company’s in-house data store and for data from international vendors with the ex-Petroconsultants’ Iris21 understood to be a key target. The technology is to include "wizards" to accelerate database hookup. The Banff Browser is built on native ArcView, in other words there is no current intention to provide a data loading function into Open Works. Any data base can be connected provided it is "reasonably compatible" with the Open Works data model. It is interesting to speculate as to whether this ‘compatibility’ demonstrates a leaning towards OpenWorks’ erstwhile PPDM-basis or its new and revised compatibility with Epicentre. The location of Banff – nearer to Calgary than Stavanger we believe – may be a hint!