PPDM AGM and user group meeting

Public petroleum data model deployed by Nexen, Talisman and in GeoLogic Systems’ data center.

The Calgary-based Public Petroleum Data Model Association’s membership has grown to 107 companies. PPDM’s main revenue contribution is now from US (not Canadian) oil and gas companies. Worldwide, PPDM has 11 members in Europe, 45 in Canada, 38 in the US, 7 in Australia and 4 in Latin America. Total revenue for fiscal 2006 was almost $CDN800,000. Model take up continues but falls short of PPMD’s ambitious goal of ‘universal industry adoption.’ PPDM is deployed in part or in whole in many vendor applications and a few companies leverage the tool as a corporate data store.

1,600 tables

PPDM CEO Trudy Curtis reported another kind of growth, in the depth of the PPDM model whose 3.8 flavor sports some 1,600 tables. These include new or extended domains including drilling additives, taxonomy, equipment catalogs, facilities, HSE, land, project and records management, and a new ‘metamodel.’

Nexen

Wes Baird presented Nexen’s technical computing strategy initiative, built around a PPDM 3.7 data store. This was designed as a vendor-independent, standards-based, business-driven framework for data management. Nexen has made a few extensions leveraging PPDM-style conventions. The model was spatialized leveraging the Spatial 2 work, now the vision is for a more standards-based spatialization. Nexen’s spatial model has also been adopted by Hydro (see our report from the ESRI European PUG, page 4).

Talisman

Lonnie Chin outlined Talisman’s well identity master (WIM) database, co-developed and managed by IHS. WIM, originally developed by for Talisman IPL, is based on a PPDM 3.7 Database on Oracle and a Microsoft .NET GUI. WIM provides secure access to current, world wide data from a blend of public and internal Talisman sources. Effort has been made to identify ‘best of’ data from multiple sources, leveraging PPDM’s Well Alias concepts and keeping the original data. Data load and roll up is shared between Talisman and IHS. Performance tuning has proved key to accessingthe 7 million row well alias table. PPDM has proved ‘a versatile, robust and scaleable data model for the Talisman’s foundational data layer.’ Co-management with IHS has allowed great flexibility and reductions in redundancy.

GeoLogic Systems

Sean Udell offered a vendor’s perspective on PPDM deployment. Calgary-based data vendor GeoLogic leverages PPDM in the GeoLogic Data Center (GDC) opened in 2005 (OITJ Vol. 10 N° 6) and now has some 6,000 users in Canada, the US and overseas. The GDC supplies customers and software partners with data from a PPDM master database. Building this began in 2004 when it was decided to migrate to PPDM from GeoLogic’s existing proprietary data model. Version 3.7 was selected because of its extensive domain support. The hardware includes dual redundant, high performance UNIX servers with live failover capability. Udell concluded by saying that PPDM ‘3.7 is huge, but not all extensions were required,’ ‘Oracle 10g is cool’ and ‘the GDC is PPDM success story.’

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