Herding cats - the challenge of data and application integration

Clay Harter, chief technology officer, OpenSpirit Corporation, explains how the ‘middleware’ solution to application integration has taken shape to manage data across multiple data repositories. The upstream oil industry is highly data-intensive, and oil companies face a variety of challenges in their quest to effectively manage data across multiple data repositories. Focusing just on the geotechnical realm, companies have many projects containing data of various types—engineering, geologic, and geophysical data—and a host of issues arises as a result of employing the different applications that need to utilize this data. Let’s consider the case of Jack, a hypothetical geologist in an oil company who needs to run a reservoir characterization program on his PC desktop computer to build a reservoir model covering several offshore lease blocks. The program needs to integrate diverse data types, including seismic data and its interpretation, well information, logs, and formation tops. Jack doesn’t know exactly where all the data he needs is located, so he asks his IT specialist, Jill, to help him locate and load the required data. Jill will have to determine which projects have data covering the lease blocks of interest and then export data from these projects into appropriate exchange formats (e.g., SEGY for the seismic data, LAS for the well logs, and ASCII for the horizons and faults), then FTP the exported data to the PC, where Jill, perhaps with assistance from another IT specialist, has to run the data loaders for Jack’s application. Additionally, Jill needs to make sure that all the data is in the same coordinate system and units before loading the data . Once all these tasks are complete, Jack is ready to roll. Elapsed time: two weeks…minimum. Jack’s workflow, while not out of the ordinary, illustrates many of the software integration problems that companies have faced ever since this industry first started doing computer- based analysis and interpretation. As a community, we have tried various approaches to address these problems with limited success. Only recently has a solution appeared that allows effective management of diverse data in multiple repositories and in addition offers end users a window to innovation in allowing flexible multi-vendor application interoperability.