The Importance of Spatial Standards for Oil and Gas
Trudy Curtis-PPDM Association CIO, CEO
As a species, humans seek to understand, describe and classify everything about our world. We've been gathering, organizing, collating and displaying information, with varying degrees of success, for millennia. Today, the resource industry, especially oil and gas, operates in an environment where exploration targets are increasingly complex to find and difficult to exploit. Our regulatory environment has become progressively more stringent and the expectations of shareholders have grown.
Vast quantifies of raw technical data, analysis information and reports are generated to support these demands within environments that are highly process intensive. The sheer volume and inherent complexity of Exploration and Production (E&P) data means that its presentation to the user for reporting and editing becomes a non-trivial task.
The richness of the PPDM 3.7 relational data model (45 subject area modules) enables diverse applications to work against a single, integrated standard data model. PPDM data models are widely used in the international E&P industry. Spatially enabling the PPDM data model allows users to access their data through a map based Geographic Information System (GIS), providing visual displays of vast amounts of data to end-users. Spatially enabled data supports activities in ways never before conceived.
Geographic Markup Language (GML) and associated web services promise to add rich new functionality to the E&P industry. Web services allow spatial information to be delivered via the Internet and provide a secure intermediate layer between corporate databases and the publication environment. GML may support helpful data portability between corporate and field sites and enable data views such as true 3D representations and volume based calculations that are not yet available in dominant GIS technologies.
This paper examines some opportunities for improving our information management strategies, our ability to communicate and our capacity to steward our knowledge for the future.