In his 2022 year end address Steve Nunn, president and CEO of The Open Group described OSDU as ‘our most active Forum, in terms of participation’. OSDU has made ‘great strides’ in 2022, balancing a ‘focus on open source software development of the data platform […] and creating the foundations of a certification program for commercial products and services’. OSDU work groups have been restructured to focus on standards for both legacy subsurface and emerging renewable energy data types’. Plans for 2023 include the adoption of a reference implementation for the OSDU Data Platform, which will be made freely available for end users to analyze data, application developers to test their products, academia for basic research, and verification test providers for use in verifying products for certification’.
If you need an update on what is currently available under the OSDU hood you might like to read Debasis Chatterjee’s (Katalyst Data Management) ‘welcome to the Forum’. Chatterjee explains how new OSDU users can access OSDU services with the Postman API platform. He recommends consulting the plethoric documentation first. According to Chatterjee, ‘ideally, you would have access to a deployed OSDU data platform inside your own company*’.
* We were curious to know what access to the OSDU toolset is available for a developer that a) does not have such a platform and b) does not want to pony-up cash for an OSDU/TOG membership. How ‘open’ is the ‘open’ subsurface data universe? Chatterjee told us that, ‘Non TOG folks can indeed deploy a ‘reference implementation’ themselves. There are two choices, one from Google and another from IBM. These could be deployed on-premise. Even non-members can do that, except they may not be able to get suitable support’. So OSDU is kind of open, but it does not sound quite like an open source community if you see what we mean.
M15 Release Notes we would strongly recommend interested parties to peruse the M15 ‘Milestone’ release notes and drill down into some of the sub headings. Explanatory documentation is not an OSDU forte. As an example, we are invited ‘to learn more about [the data definitions] project, read the Wiki’. The ‘Wiki’ in question is a blank page.
Brian Boulmay (Esri) does a better job of presenting the geospatial consumption zone (GCZ) with and the map service API that rolls out with the Mercury M15 release. Boulmay reports that a new ‘aligned autonomy’ approach was used to satisfy the different requirements of the OSDU community. The GCZ solution includes a transformer that processes the data, Apache Ignite for storage of the geospatial index, and Koop for the map service. The result is that an open source map-based API is now part of the core OSDU offering. Koop delivers geodata in multiple formats including vector-tiles, OGC WFS, Esri WFS and ‘even plain GeoJSON’. The result is that ‘operators no longer need complex ETL processes to publish map services and vendors have access to ready to use map services for their own OSDU-enabled applications and services’. The GCZ approach recently received a strong endorsement from Ryan Jarvis, subsurface data strategy advisor with ExxonMobil.
On a slightly different tack, one facet of OSDU that has always intrigued us is how existing providers of upstream data universes regard OSDU’s encroachment into their own commercial domain. Why are they putting their head into the lion’s mouth. Recent presentations from Katalyst (at PPDM) and Petrosys/Interica (at SPDM) appear to show OSDU as a secondary adjunct to their own data stores. Johan Krebbers’s initial intent of OSDU as the corporate data store may be some time coming!
In a rambling interview with Energy Connect at the recent Adipec tradeshow, Jamie Cruise (SLB) and Uwa Airhiavbere (Microsoft) extemporized on new technology, AI and data, that are paving the way for a (brave?) new world. Questioned on the importance of standards, Cruise opined that standards can be ‘a bit of a minefield’ as they may not be tied to local requirement or individual tools needs. But is the oil industry learning from other industries or the other way round? Airhiavbere stated that OSDU was a great example of collaboration and that ‘retail and manufacturing can learn from this’.
Retail learning from OSDU? That does sound a bit far fetched!
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