Wonk Alert: New standard will improve energy data sharing

Energistics, the global non-profit standards organization for the upstream petroleum industry, has published the Energy Industry Profile (EIP) Version 1.0 of ISO 19115-1. The EIP is an open, non-proprietary metadata exchange standard designed to document structured and unstructured information resources of importance to members of the energy community and to maximize metadata interoperability within the industry. Energistics' Geoportal is a Reference Implementation of a searchable catalog compliant with the EIP metadata standard. The implementation demonstrates discovery of distributed resources documented by EIP and any of three metadata standards transformable to EIP (ISO 19115, ISO 19115-2, FGDC).    Steve Richard, Geoinformatics Chief at AZGS is a member of the Energistics' Metadata Work Group and played a key role in developing the EIP and shepherding it through the international approval process.

Publishing the EIP for the industry accomplishes three objectives: 

• Enable energy stakeholders to effectively and efficiently locate, analyze and retrieve a variety of information from distributed repositories

• Support a variety of data management needs as well as the exchange of data between and within organizations

• Leverage existing standards to encourage community adoption and integration into the business while exploiting existing resources for governance and maintenance.

Jay Hollingsworth, Chief Technical Officer of Energistics, said, "The adoption of the EIP specification is intended to promote tool development and best practices that will reduce the overhead required for metadata creation, maintenance and utilization."

According to Segun Oyebanji, CIO of Chevron Energy Technology Company and General Manager Technical Computing, and an Energistics Board Member, "The EIP can be used for a wide variety of energy industry resource types but the current focus is on information which has associated geographic coordinates."

"The RESQML SIG sees great value in using the EIP and plans to incorporate it into RESQML Version 2.0", stated Chris Legg, Geologist at BP and RESQML SIG Leader.

Scott Hills, a Consulting Research Scientist for Chevron and Energistics' Metadata Work Group Lead, explained that, "Although the EIP was developed with significant community input, it's based on a newly revised ISO standard.  As a result, the Work Group believes that its focus should now shift from development to adoption.  We believe this will best help the community begin to realize value from the EIP, and identify the highest value enhancements for the next release."

For more information, visit the Energistics web site to view the Energy Information Profile Standard.

 

 [this post is a modified version of the Energistics announcement]