For Action Items see: Current Action Item List
Note: These notes are subject to review. Members are welcome to send comments to Alan Doniger at Doniger@POSC.org. Some presentation slide files are linked into the notes. Additional links to presentations will be added as they are supplied. Notable changes to the meeting notes will be summarized here.
Note: Changes to Meeting Notes. Due to techncial difficulties, portions of the notes were omitted from the first posting on June 2, 1997. This June 6 posting contains the complete text of the notes.
These meeting notes supplement the meeting materials distributed to attendees. Issues and action items are highlighted. Sessions are arranged according to the meeting agenda.
Questions about POSC in general or about these meeting notes can be directed to Alan Doniger (Doniger@POSC.org) or Paul Maton (Maton@POSC.org).
Tom Nash and Steve Daum presented the results of the Meetings Task Force. The proposals are to replace the Business Forum and Migration SIG with Member General Meetings and Member Technical Workshops; to leverage industry events (conventions, etc.,) by organising POSC meetings or groups around them; and to establish regional user groups. Tom and Bob Decker (Arco) are planning to respond to the needs of growing numbers of POSC users in Dallas and Houston by forming a Texas user group. Bill Bartz commented that only 30% of member organisations attend meetings, of whom only 10% are really active. The remaining members have an annual panic approach to renewing membership, when they have to justify the expense to their management. Bill urged members to communicate with the 70% of members who do not attend the meetings, and with non-members, to keep them informed and interested. Steve Daum pointed out the need to increase resources if the Task Force recommendations are to be implemented. There was discussion as to how technical meetings would be focused: geographically, by domain, and towards whom: end users or developers? A process is needed for bringing newcomers up to speed.
Joe Harley (BP) and Kamal Al-Yahya (Saudi Aramco) have replaced
Yvonne Donohue and Mousa Gaddourah on the Board of Directors.
POSC is in a sound financial state; some reserves having been
accumulated over recent years.
Studies of alternate funding models are continuing and are likely to do so for some time; no specific preferences have emerged yet. Steve Daum reiterated the membership's wish to be involved in this process. Bill Bartz pointed out that 90% of POSC's funding comes from 10% of the members, and that a more equitable distribution was needed.
The Agreement with POSC/Caesar has been extended to May 1997, and will be superseded by a less formal relationship which will satisfy concerns. Resources targeted on the subsurface domain will not be diverted to facilities and engineering.
Norwegian companies have tasked IT suppliers to build implementations for live take-up projects such as Visund, Asegard and Varg (VAV).
Thore and Bob paid tributes to and thanked Bill Bartz for his very substantial contributions to POSC during his leadership. POSC was broader, deeper and stronger as a result of Bill's efforts, in terms both of life cycle coverage of the E&P business, the two new sponsors acquired, and organisational preparedness for take-up. A selection committee has been searching for a successor to Bill; if members have any suggestions, they are welcome to pass them to Bob.
Questioned on the membership's strong desire for appointment of a marketing director, Thore reported that the issue was on hold pending appointment of a new CEO. Thore also observed that take-up of POSC's specifications was much further advanced in the E&P industry than are the STEP specifications in manufacturing.
Vortext is data model independent, and has been configured to access Epicentre v2.1 loaded with the Haddock data set. Data are accessed by SQL, using the DAE Language to access complex data objects such as seismic locations. Data may be edited interactively prior to being exported, without duplication, into any of several vendor mapping applications. Vortext declined to claim that they had defined any Map Business Objects. Vortext can be used in the migration process from one data model to others. Its internal code is directly linked to Oracle, and hence uses existing data assets in more than one data model. The described use of Epicentre was enabled with existing applications. At present Vortext cannot write data back to an Epicentre data store, nor can it interface data to any but mapping applications.
GeoQuest, following their announcement at the POSC Behoust meeting in December 1996, described the availability of the GeoFrame Developers kit to industry. GDK will be useable to develop commercial software enabling applications of vendors other than Schlumberger to run against a GeoFrame data store. GDK licensing terms would be set and priced "encouragingly", royalties were hard to administer, and commercial announcements are scheduled for April. GeoQuest have not yet decided to commercialise the demonstrator of GeoFrame applications running on an Epicentre data store. The future of GeoShare and its relationship to GeoFrame has not been determined; GeoShare half links are expected to exist for some time to come.
SAS/GEO is a set of tools for migrating data between data models, knowledge of whose schemas (DDL) and their mappings were captured by and in the tools. There is a meta-data engine at the kernel of system which is customisable. The user drags and drops an icon representing the source data, whose model is known, on the target application to initiate transformation to the target's model.
Asked how SAS/GEO would support POSC object interoperability, Mike said migration of data to Epicentre will be progressive, project by project. SAS/GEO does not handle bulk data, neither DAE Frames nor Oracle Blobs. The meta-data mappings are represented in binary tables, the mapping tools having the capability to parse DDL to Express to the Binary tables and reverse.
PUMA is a well production data analysis and management tool which provides well performance indicators, and integrated data store facilities, by comparison with earlier applications. Its extensions of Tigress are certified POSC compliant by TNO. Data is selected by use of the PetroBank viewer, and may then be ordered over a network.
PetroTrek is a World Wide Web enabled data browser capable of retrieving data from remote servers and displaying it on a client. It will access Epicentre data stores, but is more effective when accessing larger objects such as stored views. Demonstrations were also given.
Ark, the British Geological Survey, PECC and POSC are collaborating to extend Epicentre to model gravity and magnetic geophysical data. To a large extent, the seismic model is being replicated and modified. The results of this work will be shared with industry through a RFC and/or RFT process later in 1997.
PECC are deploying their PetroVision product for the Queensland Geological Survey. As for Sonatrach in Algeria, PECC are capturing large amounts of data in an unmodified PetroVision installation.
Quinary and Oracle have collaborated to link their respective mapping and modelling tools, Q-Mapper and Designer*2000.
IBM are migrating the former PGS/Tigress and PGS/EXSCI project data stores to Epicentre. New domains are incorporating Epicentre relational tables directly, and existing domains will be migrated later. Current additions include well production and mechanical data in support of the Puma product.
WIME has analysed the well operations reporting codes of eight companies. 250 drilling codes have been reduced to 100 activity classes, which can be related to appropriate equipment and facility types. 85 activity classes have been identified in completion and workover operations. Epicentre appears capable of satisfying about 90% of WIME's requirements. The POSC/Caesar model may satisfy slightly more.
Ben outlined the business model being set up for Open Spirit, and pointed out the close co-operation between Open Spirit and the POSC Interoperability and Business Objects Work group. Oil companies are sponsoring Open Spirit, and are not expected to undertake much development. Rather they will provide steering and control to the independent software vendors, upon whom Open Spirit will depend for enabling technology.
Three Keynote presentations were given to motivate visionary thinking on the topic.
Hans Haringa, Shell IEP, referred to the Unpredictable Certainty: that the Internet would change our business and private lives in ways no one could predict. Satellites were starting to provide unsaturated bandwidth. We should be "out there entrepreneuring", doing different things, rather than doing the same things differently. We need a global culture: forget office politics. Those that have no strategy would be overtaken by events and by those who did have one. Asked what is new, Hans responded the scale that satellite capacity is bringing: even MicroSoft did not understand it.
Martin Peersman, TNO Delft, described how today one could access data and information from multiple remote databases. Information was sharable at all levels in corporations, from the asset to the board. Decision support processes would evolve to take advantage of this information. Governments would probably take 4 to 5 years longer to wake up to events. Security would be a major issue.
Paul Haines, Schlumberger GeoQuest, Houston, described several ways in which Schlumberger and over 130 of their clients have been benefiting since the mid 1980's from network connection to Schlumberger's repository in Denver which contains logs from over 100,000 wells. Currently the number of data domains is being expanded, as is the geographical coverage. For example, Geco-Prakla, Schlumberger's seismic contractor, provides support for the full life cycle of seismic data.
The next quantum leap was predicted to be in increased bandwidth, through combinations of throughput, data compression, data selection by intelligent agents, data beaming and others. Users would need smart applications to filter wanted from unwanted data, applications such as intelligent browsers (capable of analysing the volumes of useful data), and the Internet to transmit much previously analysed data.
Databases would become much more object-oriented, massively distributed, much less constrained, and would store text and image objects.
The Internet will enable self-training of people. In Shell, all employees have Internet access and are encouraged to look outside the organisation for technology solutions before they look inside or start developing them.
Rather than rendering project and corporate data stores obsolete, the Internet will enhance options for access to and use of them.
Might the current negative balance of payment relative to usage hinder investment in bandwidth? The panel anticipated revenue models where ISP's and telecommunication companies will charge for connectivity, as software and data vendors would for "rent" of their products.
Each of three break-out groups considered one of the following questions:
Group 1 selected the following opportunities for the E&P industry:
Group 2 selected the following opportunities for the E&P industry:
Group 3 identified the following technologies as most important:
Next steps: POSC will prepare a White Paper on the Internet and its impact on E&P. The membership will be polled as to whether a workgroup (virtual or conventional) should be formed. The white paper will focus its recommendations to the Oil companies, to Information Technology companies, and to E&P Service companies. It should address both obstacles and requirements.
This is also reported as an Action Item under Agenda Item Y below.
Bill Bartz responded to Bob Pindell and Thore Langeland with several observations. POSC take-up is not in question; it is happening, but it will take time. Each adopter has their own roadmap, which makes for some interesting if unaligned dynamics. Most oils are very active; the oil price is up, capital expenditures are up, but staff levels are down. Bill sees greater opportunities in Europe than in North America, where the game is milking the last barrel. He thanked the POSC organisation for its support during his tenure, and wished it well for the future.
Art Culbertson outlined the emerging SQL3 and SQL/MM (Multimedia and Application packages) standards. POSC continues to participate in and influence this work. In particular, the X3H2 group has adopted POSC's "frame" interface model for accessing spatial data. Asked how long before SQL3 would become a standard and how long before commercial implementations could be expected to become available, Art noted that no vendor today is implementing all the features of SQL-92. Object Query Language (OQL, promulgated by ODMG) has become closely aligned with SQL3.
Note: [H]= items proposed in Houston, [R] = items proposed in Rijswijk
[H] Single physical implementation of Epicentre.
[H] How to keep a view of overall progress of POSC Workgroups, Alliances etc.
[H] Discussion of, and [R] Board panel session on, future possible Funding and Governance Models for POSC.
[H] After action reviews of Oil Company Take-up.
[H] The POSC - PPDM relationship.
[H] Project Discovery update.
[R] Process for establishing Regional POSC User groups.
[H] Capture metrics of POSC meeting attendance.
[R] POSC will prepare a White Paper on the Internet and its impact on E&P.
Updated: June 6, 1997. Send questions and comments to webmaster@posc.org
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