April 2009

The February PPDM User Group meeting, held at the Hess training facility in downtown Houston, was very well received by the 60 people in attendance. The meeting consisted of a combination of presentations, open discussions, and a question and answer session with a panel made up of PPDM Board members. The presentations are currently available through the PPDM web site under the Events page. MORE…

New Members

We would like to welcome the following new members to the PPDM Association:
• Infosys
• LMKR
• Noah Consulting
• Intellego S.C.
• IesBrazil Consulting and Services

What’s New at PPDM?

• The PPDM job board is now available and will be free for a limited time.
• A comprehensive history of the PPDM Association has been written and is available on the web site.

Upcoming PPDM Events

You can review details and register for all of these events through the PPDM web site. Even though there is no cost associated with the User Group meetings, we encourage you to sign up early as space is limited.

Calgary User Group Meeting: April 21st
We have a very full agenda for the Calgary Users Group meeting to be held in the Petro-Canada offices. The day will be a mix of presentations, open discussions, and a question and answer session with representatives from the PPDM Board of Directors.

Calgary Training Session: April 22nd and 23rd
The first day of this class will provide an introduction to the PPDM data model and the ‘What is a Well?’ interactive tool. The second day provides a review of the architectural principles behind the model and then an in-depth analysis of the Well module. [This session will be held in the Oracle training facility in downtown Calgary]

Houston User Group Meeting: May 11th
The Houston User Group meeting will be held in conjunction with the PNEC Conference (see below) at the ConocoPhillips offices at Westlake. The agenda is being finalized at this time and will be published within the next few days. Please contact us if you are able to help with sponsorship of this event.

6th Annual Perth PPDM Data Management Conference: September 1st - 2nd
The PPDM Association held its fifth Australian Data Management Conference in Perth in September of 2008. The conference lasted for 2 days with a combination of presentations, panel discussions, and workshops. The event was attended by more than 60 people from all over Australia together with a number of individuals from outside the country. The response from the attendees was uniformly positive.

Following on from last year’s successful conference, we are in the planning stages for this year’s event. Once again, it will be held in Perth in early September at a venue close to the center of the city (to be finalized).

Based upon feedback that we have received, this year’s conference will include presentations and open discussions or workshops focused in a number of key areas:
• Master Data Management
• Business Rules and Data Quality
• GIS and Data Management
• Implementation Use Cases (PPDM)

Calgary Fall Conference and AGM: October 27th - 28th
Please mark this date on your calendar, more details to follow as they become available.

Upcoming Conferences

PNEC Conference - Houston: May 12th – 14th
Both Trudy and Steve will be presenting papers at the conference. The PPDM Association is pleased to be a sponsor of this valuable Industry conference.

Integrated Operations Conference – Aberdeen: May 19th and 20th
Trudy will be presenting a paper.

Geogathering Conference – Colorado: June 8th and 9th
Steve will be presenting a paper.

2009 CSPG CSEG CWLS Convention – Calgary: May 4th – 8th
Trudy will be presenting a paper

Work Group Updates

What is a Well?
There has been a great deal of effort by the sponsoring groups over the last couple of months to establish Version 2 of the well component baseline definitions. These definitions have been finalized; an updated version of the interactive tool will be available to the membership shortly.

Phase II of the initiative is focused on well status and classification; work is expected to begin shortly.

Data Mining and Business Intelligence
A new support forum has been created recently on the PPDM forums for 'Data Mining and Business Intelligence'. This forum has been created at the request of members to discuss methods, challenges and options for data mining and business intelligence in the PPDM data model. Our immediate intention is to design examples of how data mining could be applied to oil and gas data as an exploratory venture. We welcome contributions from anyone interested in this field of data analysis.

Recovering data in conventional ways, for example through queries made directly on databases, can not extract all the information that large amounts of data can provide. Data mining is focused on the extraction of more elaborate and detailed data, seeking patterns and trends not evident in a number of 'manual' queries on a database. The process of mining a data set requires cleaning, processing, developing a model from discovered patterns, and testing the model against the original data. In this way, data mining an oil and gas data set may provide rapid identification of patterns to aid geological and geophysical professionals in identifying anomalies and trends in the data sets.

Data mining is an area of multidisciplinary research, including technology, databases, machine learning, neural networks, statistics, pattern recognition, knowledge-based systems, and visualization of data. Data mining against the PPDM data set could apply these methods to unlock the knowledge hidden within the data.
MORE…

PPDM Implementation Case Study

Talisman

The task of exploring for oil & gas generates huge amounts of information, from land maps and seismic data to well logs and core samples. “Data content, quality and volumes are rising at a frightening pace,” says Lonnie Chin, a geologist who works for Talisman Energy, a large independent petroleum firm based in Calgary. Even worse, many of the current IT systems are struggling to deliver even a fraction of the data in an easily accessible, high-quality form. “The existing technology is near the breaking point,” says Chin.

Talisman, aware of the issue, assigned Chin and a team of IT specialists to study the problem and work on a solution. They discovered that the quality of in-house, proprietary data varied widely, standards were few and far between, each division of the company had its own method of storing information, and that very little was being done to leverage the information effectively. “Inventory management and metadata collection in silos is no longer sufficient,” says Chin. “Information management (IM) is critical; IM analyzes the information and provides key relationships so that the user is not forced to repeatedly recreate them.”

Talisman’s team came up with an IT approach that they dubbed ‘the three layer cake.’ “The first layer is Data Foundation,” says Chin. “You integrate data sources into a single master data set.” The layer can include public and proprietary databases for GIS, well identification, log info, directional drilling survey information, DST, cores, and related documents. Within the data foundation, you define data standards, business practices and stewardship rules. An open standards model is critical to the system. “PPDM provides an effective tool to improve integrated information management,” says Chin. “It’s a key element in areas of governance, stewardship, integration and implementation.”

The second layer is Data Access. “You decouple the data so that data services can deliver services to different clients,” says Chin. “Dedicated services can be added to provide specialized functions without affecting the remainder of the system. You can make it web-based to provide access to global users.”

The User Layer rests on top. “You select the primary end-user destinations, and provide both delivery and transformation services, depending on destination,” says Chin. “The User Layer contains geoscience software like Petrel, GeoGraphix, and GeoFrame.”

Creating such a system is not without its hurdles. “The challenges are increasing the quality and quantity of data, and the adoption of standards,” says Chin. “Stewardship at the data foundation level is key to making it work; it must be sustainable.”

To date, significant progress has been made in establishing the three layers and improving the quality and quantity of data through a user-friendly interface. “We have a Datafinder user interface that allows access to the data layer,” says Chin. Their task is now to expand the scope and range of their work. “Some of the challenges include delivering more data and streamlining the interface for mass delivery as well as detailed searching.”

But expanding the system will take time and resources; cost justification is a major issue. “Do you focus on efficiency, intellectual capital protection, risk mitigation?” asks Chin. “The technology has been with us for a long time; this is not an IT data model issue, this is a business issue.”