Whereoil – information exploration
Feature Articles, May  29  2009 (Digital Energy Journal)

- Kadme’s Whereoil product helps geoscientists and engineers to find the information they are looking for regardless of the data’s shape or the place it is stored.

Kadme, a company based in Stavanger (Norway), has developed a software product called Whereoil which makes it faster and easier for geoscientists and engineers to find the information they are looking for.

The company recently has been awarded a contract with the Petroleum Agency of Colombia (see www.anh.gov.co), to provide its Whereoil software as a front-end for the country’s National Data Repository. Whereoil enables users to search, from a single software interface, all of the E&P data of the country.

Kadme has also recently won a tender to supply its Whereoil software for the ArcticWeb project. This will enable engineers working for oil companies to search through all the available data about the Norwegian offshore with a focus on Arctic areas – including data officially produced and managed by the Norwegian authorities including Norway’s Petroleum Directorate, Directorate for Nature Protection, Directorate for Fisheries, and scientific organisations such as the Norwegian Geological Survey, and Norwegian Meteorological Institute.

The oil and gas industry has many challenges in data management, it needs extensive searching and meaningful representation of search results, it also needs the ability to relate the information found to a map.

We are used to Google with its excellent page-rank invention, the algorithm that ranks web pages by deriving information from the cross references between pages.

Unfortunately most of oil and gas data sources are silos without any cross referencing, and a huge number of information items of exactly same rank for any given query. This is why Googling oil and gas data, especially in-house, has never repeated the internet success. It is also why a tool that sorts out in-house oil and gas data, based on the rules specific and meaningful for the industry, is in demand.

Whereoil extracts and makes sense out of data from a wide variety of sources, from information published by energy web sites (BERR, NPD Fact Pages, GEUS) to data stored in shared repositories (DISKOS, License Web in Norway), and internal file systems and Project Databases (eg Petrel, Kingdom, Geoframe). The data origin and structure is maintained when the search results are presented. In the end the users can work as though they have one extremely quick database of all the information they need for their projects.

Gianluca Monachese, CEO of Kadme

“The competitive advantage of our Whereoil technology is the fact that it offers easier access to information, wherever the information resides” says Gianluca Monachese, CEO of Kadme.

“You search and you get all your hits presented as electronic tables – easy to sort, compare, analyze and export. If you search for a well name you get a table for all tops for this well from Petrel, tables with all the log curves and archive objects from DISKOS, a lithostratigraphy table from the NPD, a table with daily drilling reports from License Web and many others. All relevant results, all similarly organized. If you were really interested in Gamma curves – type GR next to the well name and all the irrelevant information will disappear in milliseconds.”

“We do not present web pages to the users, we present data. We liked the idea of streamlined structured data publishing (you can call it “Semantic Web backbone” if you like) so much that we just cannot wait for it to come so we had to model it”.

Vasily Borisov, Kadme’s technical director

“Yes, our work would be simpler if all our data sources were publishing data rather than web pages, but RDF (Resource Description Framework) is not yet in their vocabulary”, says Vasily Borisov, Kadme’s technical director.

Whereoil search

Whereoil gathers information from different sources on one screen. This screenshot shows vessel positions in the last hour on the North coast of Norway, together with oil and gas fields, spawning areas and protected areas

The core technology is the “Whereoil” search engine, which searches the vast amount of information collected using its crawler agents, and on the files and web pages referenced by that information. Crawlers update the information regularly keeping it alive and synchronized with all the sources they access.

The advantage Whereoil offers over a commodity search engine, like Google Enterprise, is that it sorts the search results on the basis of the structure coming from the data sources. You are not finding web pages, music, videos and email – you are finding wells, core samples, seismic projects, production data and many other categories extracted by Whereoil from the data origin.

Knowledge about the nature of the information returned (is it a well?, is it an horizon?) provides the basis (semantics) for Whereoil to intelligently process the results – for example linking them to the assets on the map or putting them on a timeline.

Whereoil also makes it possible to intelligently represent the results of a search. The table view makes quick perusal of numerical results much more useful than via a regular search, for example being able to rank wells according to their production rates.

The map view, and its interactivity with the search tool, means the user can intelligently refine a search using the map, or quickly find information relating to an item on the map whether it be a news article or a well completion report.

“Search for a company name and quickly get a list of all the licenses that company is operating, all the wells they have drilled, all the published news about the company and all the public records from online case registers of institutions like the NPD or Petroleum Authority,” says Mr. Borisov.

“This is not a task possible for a normal search engine, as you need to have a good understanding of the data sources you are extracting information from. It’s not so much the cleverness of the search itself that makes the difference, but the capability of collecting, processing and presenting the information,” Mr. Monachese says.

Kadme is entirely inspired by emerging internet technologies. “There are brilliant things out there in the shape of ideas or prototypes that when applied to our industry would put Information Management on a different level” states Mr. Borisov.

“Take for example the SIMILE Piggy Bank tool from MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) which collects structured data from web pages. Brilliant but useless for the moment, since there is no data published. But narrow it down and adapt it to the industry and it will shine”.

ArcticWeb

An example of how it is possible to provide a search based integration of a wide range of different data sources, in different standards, is the ArcticWeb project.

Kadme technology integrates a variety of different official databases to provide information used by the Oil Companies, for early field development, environmental risk analysis, emergency response, etc. on the Norwegian Continental Shelf and beyond.

The sources are, for the moment: the Petroleum Directorate, Directorate for Fisheries, Directorate for Nature Management, Petroleum Safety Authority, Coastal Authority, Hydrographic Service, Clean Seas Association, Polar Institute, Geological Survey, Nature Research Institute, Meteorological Institute, Institute of Marine Research and many more will come.

“In the planning discussions, many people suggested that all of the data providers would need to accept standard data formats and publish standard web services to be able to achieve the vision behind ArcticWeb. This would have proven a major obstacle to the success of the project and a major delay in its execution. By using Whereoil as the underlying technology, this obstacle was removed”, says Mr. Monachese.

The ArcticWeb beta system will be online at the beginning of May, opened for the moment only to the six companies that are current sponsors of the project (BG, ConocoPhillips, ENI, Lundin, StatoilHydro and Shell). The project is managed by Acona CMG.

It looks like the Whereoil approach is applicable not only to static data, but also to frequently updated data. ArcticWeb can even provide information about the vessels offshore North-West Europe, gathered from the Automatic Identification System (AIS) transmitters which most of the vessels carry today. The aggregation is provided by Norwegian Coastal Authority. “There are about 5000 ships reporting every minute in the region, and every 15 minutes we get their AIS data in the index and their position updated on the map”, says Mr. Monachese.

Colombia

Kadme signed a contract with the Hydrocarbon National Agency of Colombia in August 2008, to develop a new front-end for its National Petroleum Data Bank.

The data bank, known as EPIS, is operated by Schlumberger. The data is loaded into Schlumberger data stores (Finder, SeisDB, LogDB, AssetDB) and into other databases for documents and maps. There are eight different data stores altogether.

The Whereoil software will replace Schlumberger’s DecisionPoint software, as the front end for accessing the data.

The initiative is part of efforts by the Colombian government to make their country more attractive to investment by being readily able to provide information about its oil and gas assets and production. Quick and easy access to data, using both keyword and geographic searches, will enable interested E&P companies to quickly assess existing data, thereby reducing their risk.

Oil exploration vs. information exploration

“We see a lot of young people coming into the industry” Mr. Monachese says. “An Internet generation of people that are used to having much more information available to them and that are used to processing information very quickly.”

“Those people do not drill through sediments – they drill through information” adds Mr. Borisov.

“The tools that modern oil companies need to have available for this new generation are tools that make it more efficient for them to quickly explore and process information”, concludes Mr. Monachese. “Tools like Whereoil, that will directly improve the efficiency of oil exploration by improving the efficiency of information exploration”.

Kadme

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