The key objective of Schlumberger’s new Corporate E&P Data Store (EPDS) is to store data and interpretation results of known quality. Such data is stored in the EPDS along with tags identifying its quality level as well as why it was created. The philosophy behind the EPDS changes some of the traditional ways of managing E&P data.
EPDS
The EPDS uses applications not only for interpretation, but also for data quality control, cleanup and management. Quality assurance is now performed from within the interpretation project. Quality assured data is sent on to the EPDS for storage. This may be interpreted data, in the form of horizons and maps, but also data such as well logs or seismic volumes, that have gone through the QA/QC process. The EPDS will capture approval workflows by tagging data items as they are edited and approved. Each data item has a new set of configurable attribute-value pairs that can be tailored to a particular company’s requirements. So that quality levels can be recorded as ‘unknown’ ‘good’, ‘bad’ or ‘QC’d’ etc. Context – such as the source of data (e.g. contractor name) can be tagged. The client-defined system is dynamic and can evolve with time making the EPDS an information data store rather than a database.
Federator
The underlying database is ‘POSC-based’. Access is performed at the ‘conceptual level’ using the new Schlumberger EPDS Federator. The Federator makes the EPDS database-independent. This will allow Schlumberger to plug into existing Finder installations with the same technology.
Not Open Spirit!
However, the Federator, even though it uses business objects, is not OpenSpirit. OpenSpirit reads and writes data to applications for interoperability. The EPDS is focused on data management, on ‘rich data objects’ with the possibility of ‘fixing’ data. The EPDS is furthermore designed to be configurable by the end users (or at least by their programmers). One objective of the Statoil CDS project is to be able to define new business objects, without coding, in less than 100 hours. The Federator has already been demonstrated and used to manage data in Finder, OpenWorks, GeoFrame and the CDS. The EPDS will be productized once Schlumberger has met its obligations to Statoil.
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