New OGP initiative will improve geospatial integrity within geoscience software for oil & gas operators

Thanks to a newly-launched initiative by the International Association of Oil & Gas Producers (OGP), geoscience software developers and users will be able to rely on an industry best practice for evaluating the geospatial integrity of their software. Details of the Geospatial Integrity of Geoscience Software (GIGS) initiative came at ECIM international data management conference in Haugesund, Norway in September. The event attracted many of the industry’s leading software vendors and developers.

GIGS is a process developed in response to concerns arising from violations in the geospatial integrity of data when using geoscience software. This has led to inaccurate results and ambiguities for the user community. Integrity issues such as these are of concern to the oil & gas industry.

As a consequence of the above, the OGP’s Geomatics Committee, in its role as the industry provider of geomatics guidance, launched the GIGS review process as a way of mitigating such risks.

GIGS can make a qualitative evaluation of any software’s geospatial capability by means of a series of checklists, and perform a quantitative evaluation using approved test data sets. Software vendors, developers, clients, and users can all benefit from the results of a GIGS review.

The need for GIGS has become evident during the past decade, as over 95% of the industry’s data is spatially referenced. In 2007 a Joint Industry Project (JIP), comprised of a significant number of major oil & gas E&P companies together with smaller regional operators, initiated a study to provide geoscience software developers with recommended guidance concerning industry best practise for ensuring geospatial integrity. This resulted in a number of international workshops.

The JIP delivered its findings to OGP in mid 2010. The Association’s Geomatics committee refined this work into three documents, each supplemented with additional files, as described below:
 ‘Part 1 – Guidelines’ (OGP report number 430-1), describing the GIGS process. This guidance note is supplemented by a companion MS PowerPoint slide pack (with notes) ‘GIGS Overview.ppt’ explaining the GIGS process and business benefits.
 ‘Part 2 – Software Review’ (OGP report number 430-2), containing a software review checklist to enable structured testing of geoscience software. This
software review document is supplemented by an MS-Excel spreadsheet version of the checklist, ‘GIGS Checklist.xls’, intended to facilitate the execution of a geoscience software review and capture its results.
 ‘Part 3 – User guide for the GIGS Test Dataset’ (OGP report number 430-3). This user guide supports a series of data files – the GIGS Test Dataset – to be used for testing of the algorithms and data exchange capabilities of the geoscience software.

These deliverables are all freely available from the OGP Geomatics committee website at http://info.ogp.org.uk/geomatics/
For further information, contact abby.findlay@ogp.org.uk.