Metadata in Oil & Gas Exploration and Production

1 day Training Course - Flare Solutions Limited

Costs

Onsite training, Minimum £2,000 (excluding travel and expenses), £400 per attendee. At the end of this course, attendees will have a thorough understanding of the different types of metadata, why it is needed (business value), how to develop (and use existing) standards and strategies to manage it within their organisation.

Course Outline

1. Introduction
• What is metadata?

  • Folders, file attributes, database attributes, document keywords etc

• Why do we need it?

  • Improve how we find & access information (recall and precision)
  • Once we have found information, suitability for use:
    • Location
    • Format/size/structure
    • Currency
    • Completeness
    • Scope [Geographical, depth, phase etc]
  • Assessment of ‘quality’
  • History (audit) what went on before
  • Descriptive additions to the original content (enhances content)
  • Awareness of controls on content (Ownership, custodianship, confidentiality, legal, export, retention)

2. Forms and types of metadata

  • Textual, Numerical, Pictorial etc
  • Metadata by object level (e.g. formation top versus field development plan document versus spatial layer ‘dataset’)
  • Acquisition ‘data’ versus human interpreted (meta-information)
  • Reference metadata (pick lists) versus ‘instances’ of metadata stored on data objects in a database or documents/records
    • ‘Asset’ reference metadata (often termed reference data)
    • Contextual reference metadata (often termed taxonomy)
    • Transient metadata (e.g. departments)
  • Enterprise wide metadata (needed by all functions of the enterprise)
    • E.g. Business Process Model, Company Names, Project Names
  • Functional metadata (needed only be certain functions)
    • E.g. Well Names, Prospect Names, Field Names
  • Domain technical metadata (very specific for certain disciplines)
    • E.g. Depositional environments

3. Reference Lists, Dictionaries, Taxonomies and Ontologies

  • Data dictionaries (e.g. standard log curve names, units, well attributes)
  • Aliases, unique identifiers and synonyms (e.g. equipment tag numbers)
  • Hierarchical Taxonomies (e.g. Work Product Types, Data, Document Types)
  • Ontologies (knowledge representations)

4. Metadata strategy and approaches

  • Agreeing a metamodel (and minimum standards)
  • Distributing - ‘federating’ metadata’ across the organisation
  • Manual versus automated update methods; central versus distributed
  • Maintenance and ownership of reference metadata
  • Reporting completeness of metadata and metadata metrics

5. Metadata Standards

  • Energistics E&P Cataloguing Standards, WITSML, PRODML, PWLS
  • OGC Open Geospatial Consortium
  • PCA (ISO 1592602) Ontologies Oil and Gas (OGO) Process/Capital Projects
  • Web DublinCore, WWW, OWL

6. Integrating and Sharing metadata with 3rd parties

  • Aligning with vendors/suppliers and implementing in contracts to ensure alignment (e.g. document types on capital projects)
  • Government / information suppliers indexes
  • Role of Web Services/XML on metadata exchange

7. Bringing it all together

  • Project databases (e.g. Petrel, OpenWorks, Geoframe, Que$tor)
  • Corporate Databases (e.g. CDS, SAP)
  • Document Management Systems (e.g. Documentum, Livelink, SharePoint)
  • Library/Inventory Systems (e.g. TRAXX, RSO, Cuadrastar, TechLib)
  • E&P Catalog (e.g. Flare Solutions)
  • Geographical Information Systems (GIS) e.g. ESRI
  • Map Search tools (e.g. MetaCarta)
  • Full Text Search engines (e.g. Google, FAST, Autonomy, Verity, SharePoint)
  • Intranet, WIKI’s, Discussion forums, Lessons learnt databases

About Flare Solutions

Flare has been providing solutions for the Global Energy sector since 1998. Flare have worked for over 50 Energy companies and consortia and are acknowledged as the thought leaders in E&P Metadata. Their current clients include Shell, BP, BG, Gaz De France, Nexen, Centrica and Scottish and Southern Energy. Current projects include aspects of E&P ranging from Global Exploration, Field Development, Project Delivery, Production through to Underground Gas Storage. They developed the current E&P Industry Cataloguing standards now under the custodianship of Energistics and adopted by National Oil Companies such as PetroChina. In 2006 Flare won the European Knowledge Management Project Award with Shell for their work on metadata management.