The 2010 User Group meeting of Earth Sciences Associates (ESA) GOM3 was held in Long Beach last month. ESA’s GOM3 is an ESRI GIS-based decision support tool for Gulf of Mexico users of data sources from the US Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (formerly the Minerals Management Service) and third parties including GeoMark, GXT PFC Energy and others.
Will Ghomi and Kevin Shows (Anadarko) presented a paper on ‘Using remote services in GIS, the good, the bad and the useful.’ Remote services come in several flavors - ESRI map and image services, OGC-compliant services and Google/KML streaming services. The advantage of an online feed is that data is always ‘fresh’ and there is near zero data management. Proper use of remote services makes it possible to enforce company-approved symbology and reference data sources. On the downside, there is less user control of data, performance may be poor and not all E&P applications can consume such services. Third party downtime can also create problems of availability.
Anadarko currently uses a variety of remote services that include ‘pre-packaged’ connections in ArcCatalog, browser connections, ESRI layer files with embedded remote services and the GeoPortal, a central catalog of available services. Anadarko uses Bing Maps, ArcGIS Online, Spatial Energy/I3, NOAA and other weather feeds, Premier Data Services, Google Earth and Yahoo’s geocoding and internal ArcGIS/Image Servers.
ESA’s Simon Wright showed off the new GOMsmart interface, a web-based data viewer, reporting and mapping toolset. GOMsmart builds on existing GOM3 functionality with fine-grained customization of the interface with bespoke layers , standard templates and enhanced data I/O. ESA is currently mooting adding support for ESRI’s freeware browser, ArcGIS Explorer. More from www.earthsci.com.
© Oil IT Journal - all rights reserved.