Whereoil(tm) Enterprise
What is Whereoil?
Whereoil is an enterprise search engine designed specifically for Oil Industry and combined with knowledge management and workflow integration functionality, which positions it quite uniquely comparing to other existing products on the market.
It combines the speed and scalability of an enterprise search engine, precision and structure of a master database and flexibility and user friendliness of modern Internet collaboration technologies and community tools.
Whereoil extracts business specific metadata from practically every information source regardless of it’s nature and publishes it through single web interface, available to everyone in the company who is entitled to access it for search and exploration.
It looks like a search engine it gives search results but provides functionality incomparable with the conventional all-purpose enterprise search engines due to specific “smart” information extraction, presentation and modification policies.
In Whereoil you can do amazing things with your information:
- You can automatically enforce company naming standards and dictionaries to connect all information entities to those standards;
- You can annotate information you find and create new metadata entities manually and collectively;
- You can freely manipulate the search results - sort them on any field like depth or date, export them to excel, find results relevant to what’s already found;
- You can display the results on map to find business objects like wells, fields, surveys, licenses or facilities they relate to;
- You can collect diverse information from different sources into virtual carts and requesting different operations on it such as delivery, deletion, QC, loading, etc…
- You can convert information with date properties like license expiration dates, project archival dates into a calendar to use it with your Outlook or other calendar application;
- You can open results in a context application web clients right from Whereoil;
- You can preview multitude of file types without downloading them to your local PC;
In a corporate environment Whereoil integrates with company authentication directory like Windows Active Directory e.g. It respects AD entitlements so that every corporate user only finds information that he or she is entitled to see.
Whereoil is a multi-purpose system and could be used as a:
- Corporate search engine;
- Complete data bank front-end solution;
- Data brokering solution;
- Data room system;
- Cataloguing system for E&P data;
- and combination of the above…
Search
Whereoil Search is a basic Whereoil feature. It is a search engine. A text box and a “Search” button. It performs a full text search through all of the data sources that are being crawled by Whereoil crawlers: file shares, data bases, archives, document management systems, intranet sites… But there is a little bit more to it.
Whereoil Search allows to search by a specific attribute or property. You can enable date filters to search only within the records that have been updated within last day, week or month. You can search for all the records that were updated in a given interval of time. You can use Boolean queries, groups, wild chars and more that is very helpful when you’re looking for structured data coming from databases.
Edit
Whereoil Edit makes it possible to add metadata information to any record found in Whereoil. It could be unstructured comments to a document, or a structured dropdown list based annotation connecting the Interpretation project to It’s contributors.
All the annotations become a part of big constantly updated Whereoil index within seconds and become accessible and searchable for others in your company.
Whereoil Edit is not only for editing. You can create new entities of any Information types that constitute your corporate Whereoil schema. You can capture people, suppliers, facilities, hardcopy documents, digital media like tapes and USB drive and anything else. All edits and captures always have an author and are marked with your corporate ID.
Whereoil Edit is perfect for creation of media and data catalogues, creating metadata for image files or hardcopy collections and archives that are otherwise very hard to explore. Metadata capturing is so simple - it can be outsourced to external supplier or summer students that would significantly decrease costs while ensuring a constantly growing value of your information.
Map
Whereoil Map is a GIS server that allows a quick and effective browsing of spatial data. It works on top of a geodatabase or just a set of shapefiles. It has all the features of a light GIS browser. It allows you to change zoom levels, add and remove layers, search by name, region or spatial feature, find results in multiple layers simultaneously.
Whereoil Map is fully integrated with Whereoil Search. You can execute a search for related information to all spatial features you found on the map and vice versa - almost any result set found by Whereoil Search can be send to map to see the extent of spatial features like wells, licenses surveys, etc… those results are connected to. E.g. if you find 20 well reports based on search word “blowout” - you can send them to Whereoil Map to see those wells on map.
If you don’t have a corporate GIS system - Whereoil Map is an excellent starting point. If you do - Whereoil Search can integrate with it the same way it integrates with Whereoil Map.
Whereoil Map can be used as a standalone application like front-end to a data brokering system as it is used by SINAS in Norway e.g. to broker public data for Norwegian Continental Shelf stored in DISKOS database, see: http://www.sinas.slb.com/K-map/
Project
Whereoil Project is a tool to capture and edit metadata on the Interpretation projects.
Interpretation process is creative. Projects are created on the fly for different purposes and abandoned frequently without specifying either creation purpose or abandonment reason. In an average Oil Company number of open projects per active interpreter can easily reach 100 while using such innovative products as Petrel e.g. for just a couple of years. This situation, although ideal for creativity in a time span of 2-3 years presents a risk of low efficiency in terms of not reusing the work that is done and doing same interpretations over again.
Whereoil Project allows to improve this situation without restricting interpreters and distracting them with heavy-weight Data Management tasks. It allows to capture basic project metadata in a very easy and friendly way. It works for any type of interpretation project indexed by Whereoil. You can capture creator and contributors for the project, the extent of the project in terms of it’s relation to fields, blocks or licenses, creation and tentative archival dates, relationship to other projects…
Whereoil Project suggests correct names for wells, surveys, licenses and fields based on official corporate naming conventions. It gives hints on metadata population making it more simple unambiguous and user friendly. All captured metadata immediately become searchable and therefore accessible to all interpretation team.
Whereoil Project is a tool for both interpreters and data managers. While interpreters capture the basic metadata as they go, Data Managers capture Digital Media Hardcopy Items (e.g. tape or disk with project backup or printed map of an interpreted horizon) and relate it to the project by simply specifying a project name or names in one of the metadata fields.
Search for a project and you’ll get all related information found at once. Search for a well or survey and you will find all projects that have it loaded or interpreted.
View
Whereoil View is a server side image rendering engine. It is a perfect solution for situations when information from flat files of various formats need to be available from remote locations but the files themselves could not be moved for security reasons or channel bandwidth/disk space considerations.
Imagine allowing your remote supplier to work with your image collections to capture metadata without them actually having to download the files and display them on their desktops.
Whereoil View is a perfect solution for data rooms and remote preview service for diverse data collections.
Whereoil View enforces high level of web security, works on channels of any bandwidth, prevents data duplication. It currently covers JPEG, TIFF, PDF image formats and LAS and SEGY G&G specific formats. For image formats it allows simple operations to be performed like zooming and panning, rotation, multi-page viewing. For industry specific formats it delivers all the typical functionality normally available in expensive client-side viewers, adding the advantage of not needing any tool on the client side except a web browser.
Cart and Request
Whereoil Cart and Request is a feature allowing you to collect the results of your search and ask or order someone to do something about it. It could be virtually anything - documents, wells, people… You can collect the information and order an action on top of it that entitled people in your organisation would be able to see, execute and report.
It could be a set of online projects that are to be archived or archived projects to be restored. It could be data to be loaded into the project. It could be a dataset that is to be quality controlled or deleted because bad quality.
If Whereoil is used as data bank or data brokering solution the Carts and Requests feature is for selecting and requesting or downloading data from the bank.
NWE public data
Whereoil NW Europe data - For our customers working on North Western Europe offshore Whereoil is supplemented by data extracted from official public sources for Norway, UK and Denmark.
It includes both reference data like wells licenses, fields, surveys, companies and other data like public case registries, documents, logs and core photos, stratigraphy, fields and wells production.
It presents tentative dates for Norwegian well and seismic data release as calendars perfect for data scouts.
Simultaneously with searching through your corporate information you search through automatically updated and expanded public information. If a new well is spudded, a new document is released and published yesterday - it would be in your Whereoil “weekly updates” collection within a week.
Whereoil NWE dataset is constantly growing based on requirements and prioritisation set by our customers.
In addition to public data available on Internet we can extract data from closed and password protected sources that have API. E.g. for DISKOS members we can extract both public and entitled to a customer DISKOS metadata and integrate it into Whereoil, that practically means tight integration with customer internal data.
Whereoil system including Search and Map features and covering NWE public data is available on Internet: http://www.whereoil.com . The system is by invitation only but we are happily inviting our potential customers to get to know it better and provide us some feedback on functionality and data coverage