The Energistics-backed National Data Repository (NDR) informal gathering of regulators and data managers from around the world met last month in Baku, Azerbaijan. The meet heard from a range of data repositories at different stages of evolution and taking very different development paths. To give just a couple of examples from the dozen or so on show, we contrast the approaches taken by Venezuela and Kenya.
Victor Bruley from Scan Geofisica outlined Venezuela’s journey to an NDR. To date, some 150.000 (of an estimated total of around one million) magnetic tapes have been transcribed and stored in a new data center. Bruley observed that ‘classic artisanal’ transcription methods do not scale to such operations. Manual transcription operations have been shown to produce a significant error count, so an automated process has been developed. This involves ‘no human decisions,’ real time automatic QC and minimal tape handling. Transcription has been turned into a ‘manufacturing process’ with one operator working 8 tapes drives, transcribing 150 tapes/hour.
The technique adopted is ‘blind copying’ leveraging tape metadata where available but using pattern recognition and automation on tapes of ‘unknown’ provenance. Data is encrypted and stored across multiple locations for redundancy and backup. Bruley reported free/open source software has been used on the project citing Seisee from DMNG. Capacity in 2014 is around 48TB, a tenth of what will ultimately be required.
Eunice Kilonzo reported on Kenya’s ‘innovative’ funding solution for its early stage national data center (NDC). Kenya needed to move beyond basic data management and position itself to make informed decisions about its petroleum resource. The Kenyan National Oil Co. has contracted with Schlumberger for multi-client 2D data acquisition which will provide funding for the NDC. This will deploy a Schlumberger software stack of ProSource Data Services/DecisionPoint and ESRI ArcIMS on a Windows server alongside a Seabed database and ESRI ArcSDE running on Linux.
The NDR group has kicked off a data quality/business rules project that will leverage data quality work performed by Petronas in its ‘technical applications and data repository optimization’ (Tadro) initiative. An initial work group has been established and will be reporting at the next 2016 meeting in Houston.
The physiognomists amongst you might like to checkout slide 3 of the invitation to the 2016 NDR and enter our caption competition? More presentations from NDR 2014 on the Energistics/NDR home page1203.
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