Seismic compression is about to make a major entry into Landmark’s software. The goal is for performance enhancement across the seismic interpretation process, through less disk storage requirements and reduced network traffic. For the purists, the full 32-bit dataset is always available for attribute analysis or other high bandwidth applications.

The new compression technology has been developed by Landmark’s Dave Hale and Dean Witte and is similar to the MPEG compression used commercially. The new compression technology will be released this fall and is already being beta-tested by customers. The new format will be part of a new set of data formats for SeisWorks. In addition to data compression, these will offer tiling/bricking of data for efficient retrieval and will offer 8 16 or 32 bit levels of compression. All the new algorithms will be part of the core EarthCube API.

Landmark are also working on the migration of SeisWorks to Oracle 8, but there are no plans to move the seismic data into the new Object database. The bulk seismic trace data will be stored outside of the database with some metadata registered in the database, allowing users to "know where everything is".