The BCS technical specification defines services that enable applications to achieve portability and interoperability with a minimum investment in system-specific modification. Spanning the whole E&P technical applications environment, the BCS serves as a technical foundation for those who develop and use POSC-compliant products in their E&P business.

The current version of BCS (V2.0) published by Prentice Hall (ISBN 0-13-125600-9, 179 pages, softcover) is available only in hardcopy. Contact the POSC Help Desk help@posc.org for assistance in obtaining a copy of the BCS.

In its Version 2.0, BCS updates the endorsements of computing standards relevant to technical E&P computing and now integrates the other detailed POSC specifications in their environment.

BCS Version 2.0 offer profiles as a way to characterize more precisely your business needs.

Select a profile according to what benefits you want to achieve, starting with the base building blocks:

• The Display block addresses the ability for professionals to recognize and anticipate the behavior of the software they are using
• The Data access block addresses the capability to use data from any local, corporate or commercial resource
• The OSE block addresses the capability for the software developer to port software to various platforms with minimal trouble

Note when checking requirements that the general principle is that a proper behavior at the interface is required if and when the service is used or provided. How the services is physically implemented is not part of the specification. Also, a service is used or required only when the packaging of the vendor product comprises an interface with another product, e.g., if a software package is delivered to the customer as an executable binary with its own graphics library included, no requiremnts are set on which programming language and which graphics programming API it uses. On the other hand, if that software expects to link to a POSC compliant data access facility already existing in the customer's environment, it must have the proper language binding and use the proper calls to that service.