Inofrmation > History
Background
Historically, this project follows the international EpiSEM IS Project, which involved major Petroleum Industry companies and technical software vendors collaborating through the Petrotechnical Open Software Corporation (POSC), who represents industry interests as a non-profit organisation. EpiSEM IS' objective was to specify for the Petroleum Exploration and Production Industry (petroleum E&P) a neutral, cross-vendor, and open platform for earth modelling applications. This involved consensus-based definition of the platform services and the domain semantics, collaborative development of the analysis model, and supporting architectural components.
The resulting specification is named EpiSEM IS (Epicentre Shared Earth Modelling Information Services) reflecting the initial focus on earth model meta-data management. Services were designed to enable applications to capture, codify and re-use information about the context and results of the analytical work performed by teams of discipline-focused modelling experts responsible for the optimal development and management of hydrocarbon reservoirs. EpiSEM IS captures who made the analysis, when, what data (images) were used, what interpretation software was used, and what geological and other assumptions and thought processes were applied. The effectiveness and efficiency of these teams, and the ability of their organisations to make optimal technical, operational and strategic decisions can be significantly enhanced through improved management of such knowledge-asset metadata, through improved inter-disciplinary teamwork, and through improved communication between sets of discipline-focused, specialist application suites.
For the Rest of Us
Clearly, this approach has broader applicability than the Exploration and Production Industry. Enterprises – virtual or real – global or localised – commercial or governmental – need to improve the way in which their knowledge assets are managed, and exploited within their key business processes. Over the past three decades most sectors have come to rely on computer modelling as a vital technology for business effectiveness, e.g. medical, manufacturing, engineering, insurance, environment, finance, telecommunications, and pharmaceutical. As models get more sophisticated the value of the intellectual capital embedded within grows, as does their potential to influence business decisions. In today's interconnected world, it is almost impossible to conceive of a business decision that does not call on modelling analysis from more than one discipline area, and from more than one organisation. Models and the business analyses they support are largely interdependent. There is need for a common IT framework in which interdependent models can be compared and contrasted, both retrospectively and in real-time, in terms of their mutual consistency, regime of applicability and validity, and in terms of the context in and certainty with which interpretations have been (or should be) made, behaviour predicted and conclusions drawn.
EpiSEM IS services allow the dependencies between components of different models, knowledge-assets, (produced by applications from differing vendors) to be registered, maintained, and queried in a shared catalogue. The EpiSEM ACTION Project moves this work forward, and strives for the more ambitious goal of providing services supporting inter-application communication, and coordination between activities of teams of geographically distributed modelling specialists
