In last month’s PDM you queried how exactly PowerPlan could claim to be POSC compliant. Firstly we would like to point out that while POSC has not to-date specified all aspects of compliance for products developed on the PC environment, most of the POSC E&P standards, especially the data standards critical to integration and interoperability with other products (e.g., the Epicentre data model), are platform independent. These standards hence apply equally to products developed on PC or UNIX platform. PowerPlan, a key application in the Drilling Office suite recently commercialized by GeoQuest, uses the GeoFrame data store, and logical data model, to access data. The GeoFrame data model compliance with the POSC Epicentre has been already established.

The data store used by PowerPlan is identical to, and is actually shared by, all the products developed on the GeoFrame SIP (Software Integration Platform), whether on UNIX or Windows NT operating system. Note that POSC is planning to launch a new project to upgrade the BCS (Base Computing Standards) to include PC as well as UNIX. Assuming this project is launched, we would consider contributing the standards specifications used to develop the Drilling Office product to POSC. You also raised the question as to how newly-acquired products from OTS be POSC compliant. In reality, the OTS software, TDAS and WEST, are not currently POSC compliant since they are a new addition to Geoquest's suite Drilling Office. Once their data standards will be integrated with Drilling Office in the next versions they will adopt the similar POSC compliancy above mentioned used for PowerPlan.