Shell’s Neil Shaw introduced the ‘anthropic principle*’ of information management—focusing on how we interact with technology and concluding that two fingers, a keyboard and mouse was ‘primitive.’ Shaw wondered what Steve Jobs would make of the tools used in E&P today. Will future explorationists be using touch screens? Not that long ago, we lived in a world of punched cards and no screens at all! Now we can visualize with virtual reality, haptics and immersive environments.
‘Street level’ computing in the form of Apple’s iPhone and iPad are here now and Microsoft has been pushing surface computing for a couple of years as ‘as significant a move as the move from MS-DOS to Windows.’ He believes that there is a strong business case for a move away from the desk and workstation paradigm. A change is needed to attract and retain technical talent, to offer a better user experience with ‘end to end’ standards use, improved data workflows and collaboration. The new technology promises an end to repetitive strain injury and improved productivity.
Geoscience Australia could benefit from the new paradigm with controlled and assisted data entry to Government databases and well data filing. PPDM could also play a role in the brave new E&P IM world—as the basis of a ‘federated, or virtual database that achieves the required level of data abstraction.’
Jess Kozman (CL Tech) described a project performed for BP on its east Texas Blocker gas field using technology from 3-GIG and MetaCarta. BP’s users were faced with a litany of problems such as a lack of standards for data exchange, no audit trail for interpretation workflows and poor capture of results from prior field studies. Organizational knowledge was being lost as there was no repository for technically validated data. Enter 3-GIG’s Prospect Director, an asset lifecycle information management solution build around a PPDM data repository.
GeoCom’s Keith Woolard offered a primer in seismic data loading—noting that seismic metadata management was easier in the old days of paper sections! Today there are multiple ways of geting things wrong, misaligning trace and navigation. One answer is GeoCom’s STQC utility for Landmark environments. The tool checks shotpoint positioning and trace increments before load. Woolard also remarked on a recent trend to do away with data loading specialists. Today more data is loaded by geoscientists with ‘ramifications’ on disk management and data quality.
Petrosys’ Rob Bruinsma provided a step by step introduction to ‘GIS in PPDM.’ Bruinsma, who sits on the PPDM data modeling committee, believes that storing spatial data in the database is the best way of making sure it can be found later. PPDM 3.8 can store generic spatial data including points, lines and polygons although there is no (easy) place for spatial attribute data. But to fully utilize spatial data in PPDM, it has to be grouped into familiar business objects. To do this the model has to be extended with a few tables—Bruinsma explained how, with minimal extensions, PPDM can be configured to store generic spatial attribute data. Petrosys is now proposing ‘that these or similar extensions be included in PPDM 3.9.’ More from www.ppdm.org.
* www.oilit.com/links/1010_10.
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