Background / Overview
The Energistics Energy Industry Metadata Standards Work Group is conducting an initiative that seeks to develop standards and guidelines that will enable stakeholders in the energy community to exploit a common set of metadata that can be used for efficient cataloging, discovery, evaluation, and retrieval of available information resources, regardless of whether those resources are hosted internally or externally to their organization. The envisioned stakeholder community includes energy companies and consortia, data and service providers, software vendors, and energy-related government and academic organizations.
The long-term vision is to address all types of resources with geographic references, whether through explicit spatial coordinates or place names. The initial focus will be on structured and unstructured information resources that contain explicit spatial coordinates, including GIS and subsurface application datasets, as well as spatially-enabled services and field data and documentation. The intent is to develop a standard that can be expanded over time to support additional content types and other segments of the energy industry.
Workshop Summary
A half-day workshop was held on September 30, 2009 at Chevron’s office in west Houston. The workshop followed publication of a position paper and provided an update on the metadata initiative with presentations by Chevron, Shell, BHP Billiton, Gimmal Group, Arizona Geological Society, and Energistics.
The workshop topics were:
- Overview of Energy Industry Metadata Standard Initiative
- GIN (Geosciences Information Network) Architecture Example – The NGDS Pilot Project
- Review of the ISO 19115 Standard – Key considerations for Profile development
- Summary of Preliminary Requirements Analysis
- Participant Breakout Exercise – Identifying key attributes and obligation levels
- Review of Initiative Timeline and Next Steps
- Over thirty attendees representing energy companies, service providers, and government participated in the workshop.
Attendees were organized into 5 teams for a breakout exercise. The workshop exercise was designed with two main goals in mind: 1) Walk-through the process proposed for individual/corporate review of metadata attributes, obligation levels, and control lists; and 2) Get initial industry feedback on a preliminary list of required metadata attributes.
The team feedback can be summarized as:
- Ambiguity in element names and descriptions – Teams 1-5
- Concerned about overall number of mandatory elements – Team 1
- Lineage elements must be enhanced to include sequencing and hierarchy – Team 2
- Means of denoting bounding box as approximate – Team 3
- Lack of information tagged for Maintenance element implies no maintenance done – Team 4
- Use/Access constraints should default to highest level of constraint – Team 5
- Clearly document non-domain attributes
- Clearly document conditional elements based on source type (including condition rules)
The attendees suggested several enhancements to proposed materials to be distributed to Active Participants to aid in the collection of metadata attributes, obligation levels, and control lists. First, a more concise and clear explanation of initiative scope would be helpful to large organizations where responsibilities are compartmentalized. Second, an example of metadata with values populated should be included to help clarify the definition and intended use of elements. Third, the documentation of proposed attributes should include obligation levels defined in existing standards such as FGDC, ISO 19115 North American Profile (NAP), INSPIRE (European profile for ISO 19115), and Dublin Core. Lastly, reference Web links linked to the metadata spreadsheet will provide additional context and details.
Next Steps
The Metadata Work Group will issue a call for Active Participants to provide industry input on the next steps of the initiative's work. The goal is to engage key industry representatives to assist in developing detailed requirements, attributes, obligation levels, and control lists.
The current plan estimates completion of a first version of metadata standards and guidelines for energy industry metadata by the end of the second quarter of 2010.