Flare Ontology
The Flare Ontology provides the most robust, comprehensive knowledge map of the E&P business available today. The Ontology is comprised of thousands of valid values, relationships, synonyms and aliases to help E&P professionals tag, catalogue, publish and ultimately find their E&P information assets.
In the past, the only viable option to access the Ontology was through Flare’s award winning E&P Catalog™. However, Flare are now licensing oil and service companies to have full access to the ontology for use within their applications and search and publish environments.
What is an Ontology?
An ontology is a taxonomy, or naming convention, with rich semantic relationships between its elements. Because ontologies do more than just control a vocabulary, they are thought of as knowledge representation, as opposed to a taxonomy which is a set of valid values. Flare’s E&P Catalog™ pragmatically delivers an ontology to E&P professionals.
The Flare Ontology provides the ability to deploy the valid value sets provided periodically to Energistics as the Catalog standard. However the Flare ontology includes all other relationships, synonyms and aliases making the ontology much more than just a list of recognised names. It is representation of knowledge about the industry and allows users to construct queries in new ways.
Asset classification – the asset ontology
Flare’s asset relationship module is fully configurable based on client requirements. The system allows a client to model the assets of their business, and in the E&P environment this typically covers physical assets such as wells, fields, licenses, basins etc.
A typical relationship model is illustrated right:
The assets and their relationships can both be configured for each specific client installation.
For each asset the company standard name is used and aliases can be added, including UWIs and short names. The user interface supports functionality to allow users to find these assets, and the lists are inter-related; e.g. selecting a country from the country list will limit the number of fields and wells available.
E&P classification – the contextual ontology
The E&P classification methodology is based on the concept of ‘Product Types’; the common items created by people in the industry. To date over 10000 values have been defined, with each one being attributed with a unique name and a number of aliases to facilitate searching, and relationships to other attributes in the ontology.
These relationships are illustrated right:
Each value can also contain industry aliases, examples, acronyms, company specific aliases, foreign aliases, disambiguation and of course it’s relationship to other values.
Supporting applications
The ontology is supported by a number of applications and web services to facilitate querying by other systems, and maintenance, visualisation and synchronisation. The applications suite can be used to ensure that all other applications create valid value lists from a central repository to ensure adherence to company naming standards, and to benefit from the relationships defined in the ontology data set.