Mergers and the general state of the oil industry have affected the member base and discretionary POSC funding, while low-end members have left as a result of fee changes. The London office is to close, and Paul Maton will now represent POSC in Europe.

The ‘standards confusion’ issue is to be addressed through a new initiative. John Hanten (the new Chairman) and David Archer are to meet with the other initiatives to discuss mutual benefits and "make sense of the landscape". See this month’s Editorial (page 2) for more on the ‘Interop Space’.

Open Spirit is planning to move out of the initial domain of subsurface interpretation into Shared Earth Modeling, Drilling and Production. The alliance is also working (with CGG) on a generic 3D View interface specification for building 3D applications. The Alliance is also developing its business model and attempting to clarify ‘names and roles’ of the Alliance. Chevron are to inject $400k over 3 years plus 2.5 million in people into the Open Spirit project.

(See PDM Vol 4 N°. 2) Chevron and Statoil are the main partners in this project which is intended to produce a "high performance persistency layer below business objects". Some members were critical of Synergy. Because it uses ‘all Oracle’ technology, it is arguably not really an interoperability initiative at all.

The POSC SEM now has 9 sponsors and a $ 500 K budget. The SEM is to deploy Epicentre and POSC business objects and will accommodate multi-vendor environments. The scope of the SEM is still being discussed. Some think that it should focus on providing consistent 3D modeling for interpreted data, others believes it should expand to encompass Knowledge Management and Work Flow.

Landmark’s John Lewis presented the Microsoft COM based collaboration (see PDM Vol. 4 N° 2 and this month‘s editorial). No new information was revealed, and in its turn COM for Energy was criticized as tending to cloud the standards issues, and to re-open the UNIX vs. PC wars.

The POSC board is currently as follows: -

John Hanten (Chevron)

Kamal Al-Yahya (Saudi Aramco)

Bernard Potier (Elf)

Trond Unneland (Statoil )

John Gibson (Landmark )

Keith Steele (Prism Tech. )

Stuart Robinson (UK DTI )

David Archer (POSC)