So far, the automation contractors have been absent from the ‘intelligent operations’ marketing frenzy. This is surprising in that it is their equipment that powers the digital oilfield. The situation is about to change for Honeywell which is embarking on a major rebrand of its Matrikon line of business, which is morphing into a new intelligent operations offering targeting the upstream oil and gas business.
A foretaste of the new ‘Intuition’ offering comes in an intriguing whitepaper authored by Honeywell’s principal architect Jay Funnell, titled, ‘Demystifying the Intuition semantic model.’ The whitepaper addresses the silo-based information that impacts the digital oilfield, with key data scattered in ERP systems, maintenance applications and historians. Effective operations intelligence requires seamless access to all of the above, which in turn implies familiarity with a variety of industry data protocols from ISA-95, through OPC to ISO-15926 and beyond.
Honeywell’s Intuition solution embeds a semantic model a.k.a. a ‘virtual repository’ where data from isolated silos is ‘stitched together’ on demand. Data stays in its original format reference sources, and Intuition performs the federating ‘acrobatics.’
The white paper provides an introduction to semantic modeling, showing how OWL/RDF offers a flexible alternative to the relational database. A semantic ‘wrapper’ around the data silos exposes enterprise data in a consistent manner, allowing on the fly translation of different naming conventions and data idiosyncrasies. Intuition ‘creates a layer on top of native data sources and re-shapes them into a standard model.’ Intuition, it is claimed, lets companies ‘embrace standards in a non-standard environment.’ Dashboards and reports can then be written ‘as if the native data was using ISA-95, ISO 19526, Mimosa or other standards.’
Honeywell also reveals that Intuition is ‘closely aligned’ with the Microsoft Upstream Reference Architecture (MURA). This linkage appears to be based on the fact that MURA’s marketing-driven specifications include ‘semantic data services.’ This is the first time that MURA has been associated with the RDF/OWL technology stack. The white paper features impressive slideware showing how Intuition dovetails with MURA. Other MURA members may be intrigued by this marketing land grab! Intuition is the fruit of ‘Project Nemo’ a rebranding of Honeywell’s Matrikon line of business. Those interested in learning more about Honeywell’s semantic-based digital oilfield are invited to sign up to express interest. More comments on the state of play of semantics in oil and gas in this month’s editorial on page 2.
© Oil IT Journal - all rights reserved.