State of the Art in Information Sharing

Algan, Ugur¹, R.V.L Sridhar² (1) Volantice Ltd, Tunbridge Wells, United Kingdom (2) Scicom Infotech Pvt, Noida, India

Since the early nineties, the upstream industry has tried various technical approaches to the problem of sharing and re-using information in different contexts and in support of var­ious E&P workflows. In this paper, we analyse the information sharing requirements in var­ious workflow context scenarios in order to gain insight into what possible future approach­es can be adopted to solving the information sharing problems. We then provide some ideas on how the solutions to this problem domain will evolve over the next few years, particular­ly as the information sharing requirements become more challenging when new technolo­gies such as real time field operations (smart fields) enjoy wider adoption. The key scenar­ios are:

1) Third party applications linking to industry standard application data stores 2) Offline data conversion from one data store to another 3) Selective access to individual items in multiple data stores in order to collect and harmonize the data required for comparison pur­poses, or to run an application 4) Applications that use third party business objects to man­age access to industry data stores 5) Data access and aggregation portals 6) Standard pub­lished views (web services) for industry standard data stores 7) Use of generic enterprise integration middleware platforms (already in use in other industries) 8) Collection, report­ing, summarising, and distribution of “real-time” field information

The main issues in dealing with any of the problem classes listed above are a clear def­inition of the workflow context, the data requirements for the specific workflows, and steps taken to minimize data losses related to inadequate semantic correspondence of real life objects (example, one company came up with 27 different definitions of a fault!).

We also discuss how the workflow definition standardisation may have a positive impact on the manner in which our industry approaches the information sharing problems.