WITSML – An XML based language used in the management of
Drilling Data, Along side with PRODML (Production Mark-up Language) and RESQML
– Reservoir Mark-up language, form what could be termed the triad of Oil and
Gas Data Management. WITSML, which stands for Well-Site Information Transfer
Standard Mark-up Language is used to manage real-time, right time or historical
drilling data. A couple of years back, some of the major oil operators and
service companies came together to develop a unified mode of data communication.
In one of the events I attended during an Oil and Gas conference in Aberdeen [1],
I clearly observed the need for taking this path. You had various service
companies (e.g. Halliburton, Schlumberger) within the premises of for instance
a single operator (e.g. Exxon-Mobil). Prior to the emergence of unified
structured information handling, the metering systems of various service
companies differed a great deal.
In coming together to solve this problem, a new organization
was birthed. It was called Energistics [2]. Energistics was saddled with the
responsibility of articulating and developing solutions for Drilling, Production
and Reservoir data management. An XML based data handling standard emerged.
WITSML used for Drilling Data, PRODML used for production data and RESQML for
reservoir data.
Most custodians of Object Oriented Programming Languages
latched on to this developing and evolving technologies and began developing
libraries to handle them. For JAVA, we have JWitsml [3], For .NET, we have nWitsml[4].
I used JAVA for my MSc project that was on Drilling Data
with the help of Kongsberg [5] (a service company that gave me access to their
WITSML server). Using the JWitsml 1.4 library that was available at that time
(A look at the website in 5th June, 15 showed an improved 2.0
version now available). I was trying to solve the problem of making the complex
XML based large document appear in a readable format even for non-technical
personnel as seen in figure 1. A Trajectory WITSML document was processed into
labels on the left and data on the right while graphs were also deployed for
visualization.
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Figure 1 |
The technologies used in Data management in the Oil and Gas
industry is constantly evolving so much that most Operators and Services
companies are currently incorporating Data Science as part of their
Core-Business especially in the advent of “Big Data”. It is important to get the data collection,
manipulation, visualization, interpretation and analysis right because as we
all know, data is critical in decision-making as seen in figure 2.
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Figure 2 |
[1] Digital Energy Journal http://www.digitalenergyjournal.com/
[2] WITSML
standard: http://www.energistics.org/drilling-completions-interventions/witsml-standards
[3] Java WITSML Library: http://witsml.codeplex.com/
[4] .Net WITSML Library: http://witsml.codeplex.com/
[5] Kongsberg http://kongsberg.com/
Emeka.Iwuchukwu@cerebrotech-ng.com
wilsemeka@gmail.com