1887
Volume 21, Issue 1
  • ISSN: 0263-5046
  • E-ISSN: 1365-2397

Abstract

Since the early beginnings in 1997, Web-enabled technologies have grown to become as much a part of our daily lives as the telephone and the television. A significant percentage of the world’s population today relies on the Web for a variety of information and services. Although the impact of the Web technologies on us, the consumers, is significant, it is even more so in the workplace. These days, we get up in the morning and while still at home, access our e-mail on the Web, conduct a virtual Web-enabled meeting with colleagues in another continent, order flowers for a friend’s wedding, glance at the daily headlines and weather, check the traffic and then set off to work. In the office, we study the details of an upcoming conference, sign up for a training session, check the company share price and then we actually start doing our real work- that of finding, producing and delivering oil and gas. The main focus of this article is technical workspace portals for the upstream oil and gas industry and their impact on the way we conduct our daily business. A technical workspace portal is differentiated from other types of portals (such as employee portal, training portal, community portal, government services portal, logistics portal, etc.) by three distinct characteristics (See Figure 1): * It provides access to all the information needed by technical specialists to carry out their work. * It provides access to all the geoscience and engineering applications (traditional client server or the newer Webenabled applications), preferably in the context of a specific workflow. * It provides technical workflow support utilities in the shape of virtual collaboration tools, process management tools, performance enhancement tools and best practices capture and dissemination tools. The remainder of this article will focus on describing the general problems and issues of providing fit-for-purpose information access, analysis and workflow support tools to technical specialists, and how portal technologies help offer effective solutions to at least some of the problems. To put things in historical perspective, we will provide an overview of how upstream technical information management has evolved over the last 10 years. We will then introduce a generalised architecture for a Web-enabled information, application and workflow support system and how such a system is deployed in an example project. Finally, we will conclude with a short review of future directions for Web-enabled systems.

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/content/journals/0.3997/1365-2397.21.1.25388
2003-01-01
2024-03-28
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  • Article Type: Research Article
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