The workshop, held in Arundel, attracted significant industry interest with over 90 delegates from oil companies, speculative data owners, systems providers, services providers, the DTI, and the Norwegian NPD. Held over two intense days, the workshop was organised around a number of highly participative group sessions, where the groups consisted of a deliberate mix of delegates representing different industry interests. The NPD presented their experiences of the DISKOS project, the Norwegian oil industry data sharing initiative. In addition a number of systems were demonstrated and a number of private presentations were made by delegates to the Common Data Access seismic working group.
The vision is "A common, easily accessible, digital database for the UKCS of seismic positional, ownership, and entitlement data providing a single definitive reference to a complete, high quality seismic trace data set". The first stage proposed in delivering this vision is to develop a Seismic Data Access System incorporating navigation data, ownership and entitlements, cultural data, and licence data. This would be followed by second and third stages which would index and provide access to post-stack and pre-stack seismic trace data respectively. The Seismic Data Access System including navigation data for both proprietary and speculative seismic data would be of benefit to oil companies and speculative data companies alike by offering data users a single seismic coverage reference for the UKCS indicating ownership and who to contact for access to the data. Seismic data indexing and storage format standards would be developed concurrently with the first stage in preparation for the second and third stages.
The Common Data Access seismic working group is now in the process of consolidating the outcomes from the Arundel workshop into a business case to be delivered to the Common Data Access Board in May. Assuming that the Board, representing the 36 member companies, approves the business case, then the next step will be to produce a detailed requirements specification. The provision of a system and services to meet this specification will subsequently be put out to tender.
For further information please call Keith Roberts of BP Exploration, chairman of the Common Data Access Ltd seismic working group, on 01224 834116, or A.Smith of Paras, consultants for the development of the business case, on 01983 528700.
Note to editors:
Common Data Access Ltd is an industry owned data utility with the aim of providing a common digital database for the UKCS of all primary geotechnical data. The company was created by a consortium of oil companies to enable the implementation of a common digital database for wireline well data and to provide a vehicle for addressing further data types. The company was incorporated on 10th March 1995. The well data phase is now operational, having gone live on 20th March 1996.