Building an Integrated, Digital Database Using HTML and GIS Tools: A Case Study for the Northern South American Petroleum Province

Bingham, Lisa¹, Alejandro Escalona¹, Paul Mann¹ (1) Jackson School of Geosciences, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX

In an effort to better organize and understand the many datasets available for studying petroleum systems in northern South America, we have created an integrated GIS and HTML database. Data is researched and digitized from publicly available resources, including but not limited to theses, dissertations and journal articles. The data is then organized by theme, i.e., seismic data, well data or cross-section. Each data point is identified by an assigned unique identification number, citation information, and coordinate information. All these data are georeferenced into the GIS database. To promote ease of use, we have also created a companion HTML database for each datapoint in the GIS database. Utilizing the hyperlink capabilities in ESRI's ArcMap 9.x, the user identifies a point of interest in the GIS and immediately opens the corresponding HTML page. New information is easily added to the GIS database using editing tools to create new features for a dataset. Because each HTML page represents one piece of data from the GIS database, new pages are easily created and added to the HTML structure. Depending on the specific needs of the users, the HTML pages may be located on a central network or hosted on a website. The hyperlink tools in the GIS are able to differentiate between a folder location on a network or local drive and a URL. This type of database allows all technical levels of users to view and compare data and to construct maps in an efficient manner.