Speaking at the 2023 ECIM Data Management conference in Haugesund, Norway, Equinor’s Jan Harald Mortensen reported progress on OSDU* in Equinor. The talk was titled, ‘How Equinor is putting OSDU to work’ but Mortensen started with a ‘spoiler alert’ that ‘we are not there yet!’ Equinor has spent three years trying to implement OSDU as a key element of its data platform. Last year’s objective was for OSDU to be a component of Equinor’s ‘Omnia’ subsurface data platform. Earlier in 2023, the hope was for an ‘operational OSDU’ by the year end. What has been achieved is a vast data loading campaign with some 20 million well datasets. The current focus is on seismic SEG-Y and metadata. But, as of today, there are zero end users on board. Mortensen asked rhetorically ‘should we stop?’ ‘No! we are enablers!’
So far OSDU has been an IT-driven project, but now the business domains are starting to wake up with actual use cases. ‘Will we be there by year end 2023?’ ‘Maybe, interest is starting to grow. But resources are an issue. Currently all the work on the OSDU data platform is being done by Equinor, ‘We are doing everything … this does not scale’. Equinor needs to open the platform to data providers and let them push data into OSDU. There is also an issue with data stakeholders for business domains and Omnia**. A scalable process is needed and this does not come out of the box with OSDU.
Returning to the end users, the data consumers, Mortensen asked enigmatically, ‘What is the actual intention of the OSDU platform?’ To answer this, Equinor needs to talk, cooperate and contribute to the TOG/OSDU Forum. Internally, work can start small on ‘40 year old data problems’, by making a small in-house built tool to ingest data in OSDU. There is value in learning the technology. Standardization is driving forwards with OSDU’s API-driven communication, definitions and schemas. But Mortensen warns, even if we are now 100% OSDU standardized and schema validated, that does not mean we are interoperable! There is plenty of wriggle room in modeling from a data definition. Today, there is a lot of arm waving and folks saying that it will be a lot harder than anyone thought. Mortensen advocates leveraging work arounds, taking short cuts and ‘reading the schema’. Driving interoperability is not easy. Why OSDU? Mortensen quoted JF Kennedy’s rationale for the 1969 moon landing, ‘we do things not because they are easy, but because they are hard!’
* The Open Subsurface Data Universe.
** Mortensen described Omnia as Equinor’s ‘cloud journey’, observing too that, ‘there are many answers to the question ‘what is Omnia?’!’
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