Upstream IT standards review (December 2001) PDM brings you a review of standards body activity with exclusive reports from the American Petroleum Institute, the European Petroleum Survey Group, Geoshare, LAS, Open Spirit, the SEG, WITS and of course POSC and PPDM. When we last reviewed standards (PDM Vol. 4 N 5), we counted six different organizations in the upstream technical and business space. Since that time, one is officially deceased, one moribund, one quiescent and another has gone commercial. Life in the standards space can be dangerous! But some dot-orgs are alive and kicking whether they are conservative, reflecting well established best practices, or like the XML brigade, cutting edge and speculative. PDM reports on the survivors and the also-rans. APITena Allain heads up the American Petroleum Institutes (API) ComProServ task group which has been established to investigate standards for financial transactions. ComProServ standards support the specification and execution of complex products and services. Allain told PDM how ComProServs twenty member companies have come up with XML-based standards for thirteen transactions, along with a common library and schema.Cement jobsComProServ works to describe complex services such as well casing programs or cement jobs at a data and work order level. Such information will then be traded back and forth between operators, contractors and suppliers. ComProServ began by looking at work done in the chemical and electronic industries (RosettaNet) and plans to re-use this work.EDIThe API work has its roots in previous EDI-based standards, used for invoicing of drilling and geophysical services. The EDI standards are free-form text based so the move to XML allows for more structuring of information, more context and metadata to be included. According to Allain, most US majors use the PIDEX EDI standards for services and joint interest billing, but there was less take-up for these standards in the smaller independents. The move to XML may increase take-up for the smaller players.If it aint brokeThe migration of EDI based standards that are in everyday use to embryonic XML standards is a highly charged subject. As they say in Texas, if it aint broke, dont fix it. Allain said that EDI is still going strong. Many users do not even deploy the latest versions of the EDI standards. The advent of low cost bandwidth has significantly reduced the costs of EDI transactions. On the other hand, XML is not all that cheap particularly when the costs of an Enterprise Application Integration platform such as Tibco is included in the calculation.EPSGBPs Roger Lott heads up the European Petroleum Survey Group (EPSG). Lott told PDM how the EPSG started out as an informal meeting of senior survey personnel from the major North Sea operators. In the mid 1980s, the group pooled internally compiled data on worldwide coordinate systems, which grew into a significant resource, which was leveraged by POSC in the Epicentre data model.GeoTIFFEPSG standards have seen take-up outside of the oil and gas industry particularly by satellite image specialist SPOT which rolled the POSC/EPSG work into the GeoTIFF standard for geodetically referenced bitmap imagery. The EPSG work has been further leveraged through the Open GIS Consortium, extending the EPSGs work into the Geographical Information System community at large. The EPSG data set is now a de facto worldwide reference and is available online as an Access data base from the EPSG website.ISO 19111The EPSG currently working on a new version of its specification which will become the ISO 19111 geodetic standard. This will be available in the next release of the EPSG database Version 6.1. The EPSG plays something of a proselytizing role with respect to the GIS industry in the hope that promotion of the EPSG standards will help its members. Other EPSG work includes the issuance of guidance notes best practices for the positioning business.GeoshareJack Gordon (Conoco), who chairs the Geoshare user group told PDM that “Geoshare is still in use, judging by the 3000 hits per week to the Geoshare website”. Most visitors are looking at the data model itself. Geoshare is a stable data transfer environment with few requests for changes. There have been proposals for an XML-based version of Geoshare, this is still under discussion. Gordon believes that the current Geoshare model, based on the API RP66 protocol, still has merit. The standard offers a sophisticated environment, with built-in support for units of measure (UOM). It is efficient for binary data and is self-documenting. But Gordon acknowledges “XML is a wonderful tool it is great to be able to read the ASCII information.” In any event, future XML standards should build on prior work such as Geoshares UOM standards.Finder to OpenWorksOne significant usage of Geoshare is to connect Finder to Landmarks Open Works. An E