Borehole Interoperability Experiment

For more information please contact innovation@ogc.org

Geological and geophysical data are crucial for many domains of our society. Any domain that need to probe the underground relies on these data: raw material exploration, hydrology, oil and gas, mining, civil engineering (constructions, transportation), and environmental sciences. In most cases, the according human activities that need to investigate the underground are relying on indirect observations methods like geophysical measurements (e.g., seismic or geoelectrical exploration). However, for direct investigations of the subsurface and for the verification of indirect measurements and models, drilling is essential. Notwithstanding, each geoscientific domain has its own set of methods and interest (resource geologists look at rock properties relevant to mineral occurrences; hydrogeologists at water resources; civil engineers at mechanical properties; and the energy sector at fossil fuel potential) they all use the same basic engineering feature, a borehole.

Even though several standards already exist to describe a borehole, its associated data and their position along a borehole (including OGC standards), they all restrict themselves to a specific viewpoint.

Involving key implementers and editors of the existing standards, this Interoperability Experiment aims at defining a domain agnostic and comprehensive (umbrella) vocabulary for a general concept of boreholes, which may eventually become its own specification and be properly reused by various domains when needed.

Based on a wide variety of use cases such as ‘scientific exchange within and across research infrastructures’, ‘industrial’, ‘building and construction’, ‘regulatory obligations’ and ‘geo-resources monitoring and exploitation’ it will provide the basis for establishing a better integration of existing standards and possibly a future common approach for describing boreholes.

The Borehole Interoperability Experiment will define a domain neutral semantic for a general concept of borehole and produce a public OGC engineering report summarizing the overall cross-domain, inter-standard findings and recommendations for a best practice implementation that should follow.

Borehole Interoperability Experiment overall schedule is the following:

• June 2018 – Use cases and semantic requirements,
• Fall 2018 – First draft of the borehole semantic umbrella available. Tests and iterative enhancement
• March TC 2019: First draft demonstration
• June 2019: Demonstration and evaluation complete at summer TC
• September 2019: IE complete, final document submitted

The Charter document is available here.

The Github repository is https://github.com/opengeospatial/boreholeie . Its wiki contains info on past and upcoming meetings