The joint industry project on geospatial integrity of geoscience software (GIGS) held an open meeting in ExxonMobil’s UK headquarters earlier this year. JIP members include BP, Devon, ExxonMobil, Petronas and Shell. The project is managed by geomatics specialist Cain and Barnes. Funding has been set at $1.5 million over 3 years. The project is to evaluate the geospatial data handling capacity of some of the industry’s major vendors including ESRI, Halliburton and Schlumberger. GIGS will issue a test data set and provide a mechanism for vendors to self-certify products and work towards a GIGS-compliant specification for upstream software. JIP members will get the detailed software evaluations while GIGS will also release summary information and a test dataset to industry. GIGS also has a role in educating users and developers in the finer points of oil and gas geodetics, data management and geographic metadata. In fact much of the day was taken up with a series of tutorials on geospatial data integrity.
GIGS includes a checklist of recommendations to developers for documenting their software’s data handling capability and troubleshooting activities such as merging datasets with different coordinate reference systems.
A key GIGS evaluator is the degree of compliance of a software tool with the authoritative geodetic data set of the European Petroleum Survey Group—epsg.org. GIGS plans to build on the EPSG work to create a suite of geodetic parameter libraries. Another GIGS sub project covers the user interface for geospatial information—seeking to assure consistency and completeness in geodetic nomenclature. More from www.oilit.com/links/1010_9.
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