Subsurface Data Access – OBDA Pilot

Subsurface digital transformation is about overcoming the bottleneck of data access and increasing the quality of interpretations by means of the better use of data. The data access bottleneck is substantial as up to 70% of subsurface experts’ time is spent finding, accessing, integrating, and cleaning data before analysis can even start. (Putting the FOCUS on Data, W3C Workshop on Semantic Web in Oil & Gas Industry, Jim Crompton).

Viewed from the Geoscientist, it is hard to get an overview of all available data related to an area of interest, as this data is spread over different applications and many internal and external data sources. No unified view is, as a rule, available up front, though Project Data Managers (PDMs) assist. It is difficult to extract data from databases; should complex queries have to be written, Central Data Managers (CDMs) typically assist. It is challenging to extract data and information based on geological and petrophysical attributes (see the user scenario example below) as it is not possible to execute these types of queries simultaneously on multiple data sources. It is challenging to integrate datasets before analysis can start: this is often tedious manual work that the geoscientists must do themselves. It is incredibly difficult to extract data and knowledge from the text documents as there are very few tools that can deal with the contents of unstructured documents and reports. Geoscientists are well aware of the limitations of the workflow. As a result, valuable analyses on data are too often not performed, and possibilities in data are too often not detected.