Petris Teams Up with Client to Find Better Way to Handle Corporate Data

Challenge: One of the world’s largest national oil companies sought to better manage its exploration and production data. The company realized the need to improve the workflows used to optimize and streamline the loading, archiving, tracking, quality control, publishing and management of key information such as seismic data and well logs. There was a growing sense of urgency as the company faced a substantial increase in data collection as a result of engaging new partners to develop significant new reservoirs.

The outcome was the concept of Data Services (DSS), which began in 2003. DSS today has evolved into OneSource.

Opportunity: The company saw the opportunity to develop a long-term asset management system which would allow its geoscientists to manage large volumes of data assets, increase operational capacity, and respond to changes without making a considerable investment in its underlying technology infrastructure. The company also would benefit from retaining a record of operational practices to provide a “lessons learned” asset for its organization.

Solution: OneSource was conceived by the company and designed and developed in coordination with Petris. Based on smart business object technology and web services (service oriented architecture), OneSource allows defining and changing business rules, workflows and data types.  Examples of workflows and services that are supported by OneSource include register, load, subscribe/notify, security, search, data exchange, history/heritage and others.

OneSource had to be a generic system with wide functionalities and a simple user interface targeted for utilization by geoscientists as an integral part of their daily activities. The system exposes scientific data to end users in an object fashion, regardless of the underlying storage format which can be structured, unstructured, database or application.

Impact: OneSource has proven its value by enabling the company to manage seismic data and workflows for the Red Sea in weeks instead of months that it took in the past when undertaking such a complex data management and integration task using traditional methods.

The project initially was focused in 2008 on managing seismic field acquisition data. In 2009, the new system was extended to seismic post-stack data and currently is actively being expanded in the well logs data domain.

For seismic data, OneSource has more than 200 users and includes more than 120 different seismic data types representing about 40 Tb. OneSource was built to coexist and operate with other data management systems. It can complement legacy data management systems and preserve previous investments in existing data management solutions.  OneSource has the capability to manage data that resides in any structured or unstructured database, making it suitable for managing geosciences data.