Data warehousing tears down oil silos

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Tying together geospatial details into data warehousing could help fields such as oil and gas solve their information silo problems, according to researchers at the University of Manchester.

A this week's Teradata Partners conference in sunny Las Vegas, Duncan Irving, the head of IT at the university's earth sciences department, detailed his development partnership with the data warehousing firm.

Irving noticed a problem in his classes at the university. In the oil and gas sector, data is kept in silos and analysed in databases, keeping people in the sector from seeing what each other are doing and limiting their ability to look at whole sets of data. He was working on developing a solution when he had a call from Teradata.

"Teradata found me," he said. "I'd never heard of them before, as they don't impinge on oil and gas." After hearing about their data warehousing solution, Irving realised a solution could be developed which would solve the aforementioned difficulties.

Working along side Rasheed Masroor, a senior consultant at Teradata, Irving developed a way to store oil information alongside geographical information, letting everyone across the oil sector - from exploration to retail - see a broader, more detailed set of data organised by location. "It's taking real data and turning it into models," said Masroor.

"It's a pretty nifty visualisation front end," added Irving.

The system is just the back end, Irving said. They plan to work with application partners to integrate it with the standard front-end interfaces which engineers, finance and other groups already use. "It's the same data store used by everyone, presented to them they way they want to see it," he explained.

Such a broad reaching data analysis system could have a knock-on effect across different aspects off an oil or gas company, Irving said. The more detail a firm has about potential deposits, the more accurate their financial outlook reporting will be - an issue big oil firms have been in trouble for in the past, Irving said.

It can also help exploration and extraction engineers communicate. Now, if a data set is incorrect or there are unexpected problems, data sets need to be exchanged. With Irving's system, everyone is working with the same data, which saves time. "You don't have to rewind, you can work live and see what the problems are without data transfer back and forth," Irving said.

"Any industry has to do something with location," Irving pointed out. Retailers can use such techniques to track people in their shops, telecoms firms can use it to manage switches and transport firms can gain clear benefits from GPS, he said.

Irving said the system is effectively finished, and that they're looking for application vendors to partner with before taking the product to the market.

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