--> Abstract: Improving E&P Data Interoperability Through the Development of a Reusable Earth Science Ontology for Basin Characterization, by Melanie A. Everett, Scott Hills, Mark Gahegan, Brandon Whitehead, and Boyan Brodaric; #90124 (2011)

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AAPG ANNUAL CONFERENCE AND EXHIBITION
Making the Next Giant Leap in Geosciences
April 10-13, 2011, Houston, Texas, USA

Improving E&P Data Interoperability Through the Development of a Reusable Earth Science Ontology for Basin Characterization

Melanie A. Everett1; Scott Hills1; Mark Gahegan2; Brandon Whitehead3; Boyan Brodaric4

(1) Chevron Energy Technology Company, Houston, TX.

(2) Centre for eResearch, University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand.

(3) School of Environment, University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand.

(4) Geological Survey of Canada, Ottawa, ON, Canada.

Data and information volumes relevant to the upstream energy industry continue to expand in a growing number of diverse, distributed repositories, which makes discovery and integration of information exponentially more difficult for knowledge workers. We believe that improving this situation requires adoption of a knowledge management infrastructure reliant on semantic technologies and industry-wide semantic standards. Central to these standards is the concept of a reusable ontology, i.e., a codified organization of concepts and their relationships that can be shared across domains, accessed by various types of applications, serve as an anchor for more detailed ontologies, and may itself anchor into higher-level abstractions for reasoning across a broader domain.

To demonstrate this idea, we have developed a reusable earth science domain ontology, the BASIN ontology, focused on concepts associated with basin characterization. This ontology could serve as an anchor point for future domain-specific ontologies intended for use along the entire upstream value chain from hydrocarbon exploration to production. To further promote semantic interoperability, the BASIN ontology will itself be anchored into upper-level earth science ontologies in the public-domain, such as the Semantic Web for Earth and Environmental Terminology (SWEET) developed by NASA.

The central concept of the BASIN ontology is the basin class, which is related to other classes through select earth processes (e.g., the basin class is related to the strata class via tectonic processes, such as subsidence). This high-level abstraction of primary basin concepts allows for application of the ontology to a wide variety of E&P earth science projects. The ontology was developed by resolving semantic ambiguities and differences in the terminology used by practitioners within the domain through knowledge elicitation from key E&P subject matter experts. This disambiguation resulted in identification of central concepts represented as classes, their definitions, and the establishment of critical connections between classes.

Current applications benefiting from the BASIN ontology include both corporate knowledge management and enterprise semantic search. However, the development of the BASIN ontology was driven fundamentally by a desire to increase semantic interoperability throughout the geoscience community and encourage development of semantic standards having value to the upstream energy industry.