History of PPDM

The PPDM Association is the not for profit, global society that enables the development of pdata professionals, engages them in community, and endorses a collective body of knowledge for data management across the energy industry.

+ Personal Computers for Oil & Gas Data Management

Personal Computers for Oil & Gas Data Management

Cast your mind back, for a moment, to 1988. Ronald Reagan was leaving the White House, Rain Man was the year’s biggest hit, and mainframe computers were being challenged by PCs. Although politics and Hollywood might be getting all the public attention, it was the transformation of the computer industry that held far more challenges and consequences, especially for the petroleum industry. Thanks to advances in a broad swath of exploration and development technologies, oil companies were gathering and interpreting far larger volumes of data than ever before. For the last few decades, they had relied on mainframe computers, proprietary software and in-house staff to handle the work. It was increasingly becoming clear to E&P companies, however, that there were benefits from employing workstations, including improved graphics and user interactivity.

The instigation for what would eventually become the PPDM Association began several years earlier, in 1984, when Gulf Corporation had been purchased by Chevron and terminated its available services to its subsidiary Gulf Canada. At the time, Mel Huszti was the coordinator of exploration mapping systems at Gulf Canada, in Calgary. “We had been dabbling with workstations and had similar systems between Gulf Canada and Gulf Corporation in Houston,” he recalls. Most of Gulf Canada’s workload continued to be processed on Unisys and IBM centralized systems, but in October, 1988, Gulf Canada announced it was phasing out its mainframe Unisys computer. Due to lower oil prices, their 1989 budget was also reduced, and there would be less emphasis on western Canada exploration activities. However, the company’s emphasis on mapping and workstations would be increased. The target date for phasing out the Unisys computer was July, 1989.

The relocation of Gulf Canada’s E&P mapping from the Unisys computer involved:

Improvements to the geophysical mapping system that used the IBM MVS operating system;
Migration of the mainframe well data base to a new data base environment;
Replacement of Gulf Canada’s existing base mapping software and development of an appropriate interactive user interface software;
Transfer of the existing project data base structure into the workstation environment. This suggested opportunities to involve 3rd party software developers in joint development of some applications.

The scope of the project database structure had to accommodate general well header information, digital well log data, seismic location information, seismic data, land parcel information, reservoir field/pool information, faults and formations, geographical information, and surface grids. By December 1988, the Gulf team had decided that it would move the various exploration data processing activities to a network of several Unix workstations –Sun 3/60, with Sun 4/280 and Tektronix 4335 machines. The intent was to use the most appropriate hardware for the various exploration tasks and ensure that all the software was, as much as possible, portable across the network.

In conjunction with an "open" hardware strategy Gulf envisioned an "open" software strategy that would make use of an industry standard data base and network products. From an exploration application perspective, it would be desirable to plug into an existing 3rd party package which would provide general data base services and allow Gulf to add any specialized and proprietary products.

+ The Drive to a Common Data Model

The Drive to a Common Data Model

To achieve these goals, Huszti needed a common data model that would allow Gulf Canada to run geoscience and engineering software applications to access the same data from a consistent data structure. At the time, a host of small software firms in Calgary were experimenting with new platforms, databases and software that could run on desktop hardware. These firms included Applied Terravision Systems (which had been working to use the Oracle database for their oilpatch applications), Finder Graphics (which had developed interpretation software that relied on integrated well and seismic data), and Digitech (which had developed software to integrate public data sources and distribute the result to their oilpatch clients). Pat Rhynes was a founder of Applied Terravision Systems. “We were approached by Mel Huszti in 1988,” he recalls. “Gulf Canada needed a data model that would support its move from mainframes to workstations. I wanted to it to be an open model because, as Mel said, “If any company goes into receivership, I want the data model to reside in the public domain.”

Starting such a project in Alberta had another advantage. The Energy Resources Conservation Board (ERCB) had legislated requirements for submitting well data. “They had established standards for data decades before the advent of PPDM,” says Yogi Schulz, an industry consultant and long-time PPDM Association board member. “One of the main reasons that PPDM started here is because Alberta had more encompassing standards than other oil centers around the world. It was the fruit of necessity.” Gulf Canada negotiated a joint software development venture between Gulf Canada, ESI (Finder Graphics), Digitech and Applied Terravision. Then Huszti put together a brainstorming team to come up with a prototype data model. The team included Davis Swan from Gulf, Jim Sharuk from Digitech, John Gillespie of Finder Graphics and Pat Rhynes from Applied Terravision. “Mel put us all in a room and told us we couldn’t come out until we had something,” says Rhynes. “It took us about a week to finish our first module. Frankly, it was awful.”

But it was a start. In the following months, a dozen experts focused on making the system work. “Digitech had to convert its data format to accommodate the new model,” says Huszti. “Both Applied Terravision and Finder had to convert their application software to Oracle in the new data format. The hardest part for Gulf Canada was to have software which extracted data from an IBM mainframe and transferred the data into an Oracle database sitting on a Unix work station. Unless you had that in place, the data wouldn’t transfer across. It took us six months to de-bug the communication software.”

The team plowed on, and by the following year it had a functioning system that would take information from thousands of wells, combine it with seismic shot point locations, and display it on a map at a workstation. “It was a win-win-win situation,” says Huszti. “The company cut costs, removed the Unisys mainframe and improved the use of computer technology.”

+ Overwhelming Immediate Interest

Overwhelming Immediate Interest

The team was eager to share its invention and ask for industry input. “We were able to present a paper at a Geobyte conference in late 1989,” recalls Rhynes. In addition, Applied Terravision exhibited at the SEG conference in San Francisco that year. The data model was on display and Applied Terravision was giving the model away for the cost of the binders. Bob Tretiak couldn’t believe the reactions. “People were just grabbing the binder and throwing cash on the table”, says Bob. The response, to Applied Terravision’s surprise, was overwhelming. “We sent over one hundred floppy disks worldwide for $100 each. People were really excited; you have to remember, it was the late 1980s and people were astounded that someone was actually sharing a data model and asking for help improving it. There had been very little discussion of open standards prior to this. I don’t think we realized how much the oil & gas industry would jump on it.”

In retrospect, oil & gas industry demand for an open data model seems almost inevitable. An open data model eliminates the need to develop, evolve and maintain internal data models and related custom data management software. It reduces take-up time for new software applications, lowers systems costs to update and maintain information, and improves the quality, quantity and timeliness of information. It clarifies data ownership. It reduces risk through improved reliability with clear, concise data definitions. It minimizes data transfer difficulties between software applications or multiple databases. Using an open data model not only reduces costs, but positions companies to become more productive, efficient and competitive.

But creating a standard model for the petroleum industry that was accepted and actively employed by many diverse parties was a task beyond the scope and capabilities of any one company or a government agency. Some form of organization was needed that could transcend commercial and bureaucratic boundaries. “It made sense to start a neutral, non-profit organization,” says Rhynes. In 1989, Mel Huszti and Bob Tretiak, president of Applied Terravision, created the Public Petroleum Data Model (PPDM) User Group. The goal was to create an open, business driven data model for the petroleum industry with the participation of volunteers from a broad range of companies, government agencies, vendors and service companies. “We got a lot of volunteers soon after,” says Rhynes. “No one had a vested interest.”

+ Building an Open Standard; 1991-1995

Building an Open Standard; 1991-1995

In 1991, the PPDM Association was incorporated in Alberta under the Societies Act, making it a membership-based, not-for-profit society. The first Annual General Meeting of the PPDM Association was held in Calgary, in the fall of 1991. It consisted of a technical gathering, with technical papers and workshops, as well as incorporation of the board and the official adoption of the PPDM Association name. (In 1994, a conference was added in Houston, in which technical papers and workshops were presented. In 1999, another annual conference was added in Australia. Increasingly, these conferences covered both data modeling and general data management issues.)

Ian King, who came onboard with the PPDM Association in February, 1991, recalls the early years. “I was the first, full time data modeler, but I also did the marketing and technical writing and conference logistics.” At the time, the PPDM Association didn’t have an office of its own. “We were real vagabonds, getting shifted from place to place. We started out in the Oracle office then moved to Canadian Hunter, then to Home Oil.” All of PPDM’s equipment had been donated. “We had a Digital System work station and an old McIntosh with a floppy disk drive for documentation.”

From the beginning, the PPDM Association laid down a collaborative process to build the open standard data model. Gathering together experts from around the world in a round-table format, standards and definitions for modules were discussed and agreed upon through a vetting process. David Fisher, a geologist with Shell in the early 1990s, was chairman of the PPDM Association board from 1994-98. “In the first half of the 1990s, PPDM was mostly focused on data model development,” says Fisher. “The data model grew quickly to cover well data, seismic locations, land and production.”

In 1993, PPDM and IBM agreed to establish a joint common data model. PPDM would provide its data model, and IBM would provide MERCURY LDM (logical data model) to PPDM. Sponsors would provide $2 million over three years to finance integration and ongoing support. “I think IBM saw it as a good opportunity to be introduced to the O&G community,” recalls King. “But it was a multimillion dollar venture, and there weren’t sufficient funds from the PPDM side to support it.”

During this time, another industry-sponsored organization for information standards, POSC, gained prominence with a sophisticated, theoretical, reference data model. “POSC positioned itself well within the executive suite,” says Yogi Schulz. "They were very well funded by several of the largest global oil companies.” In 1994 POSC and the PPDM Association collaborated on adapting the POSC model to an Oracle relational database system using PPDM's pragmatic development approach. Unfortunately, the test segments of the merged model did not show promise of success. “Faced with this reality, and our much more modest resources, we finally pulled the plug in 1995,” says Schulz.

The PPDM Association returned its focus to building an open standard, and adding modules. Starting in 1995, The PPDM Association began to work with industry participants on Special Projects. “These are projects that are funded by sponsors to meet a need that they have,” says Fisher. “The PPDM Association works with the sponsors to make it happen. One essential stipulation is that the results form part of the open standard.”

One of the first Special Projects was the Spatial Enabling project, in 1995, sponsored by ESRI, Talisman and Chevron. Spatial information is widely used within the petroleum industry to display seismic lines, land, wells and other surface features on maps. Incorporating spatial data would greatly enhance the value of PPDM. In later versions of the project (there have been four spatial projects), members worked out methods to incorporate GIS into the model, and identified risks and benefits to various methods. In January 1995, the PPDM Association had its first paid Executive Director, Mel Huszti, and an administrator, Carol Paulin. Trudy Curtis, the PPDM Association’s current CEO, came on board in early 1996 as a Data Modeler. “My first job was to turn ideas about seismic into a seismic data model,” says Curtis. A seismic model first appeared in Version 3.2, but it wasn’t embedded; it was a separate working piece that led to problems with integration. The PPDM Association had done extensive brainstorming on how the model should be improved, but the methodology, documentation and technical approach had not been formalized. “When I arrived, I had a three-foot high stack of flip chart papers and hand-written notes outlining ideas. These came from the early part of the data model’s development, and there had been a very free-wheeling approach to design. The model was poorly documented and there was no solid process – and the result was a bit of a patchwork quilt.”

+ Building An Open Standard 1996-2000

Building An Open Standard 1996-2000

A major part of the problem was that there was no formal procedure to add content to the data model. PPDM and volunteers worked out a set of basic architectural principles for the entire data model and defined a process to manage them. “Version 3.3 had just come out in 1995,” says Curtis. “Some preliminary architecture principles had already been addressed, but we had to take a full set of architecture principles and apply them to the data model for the next version. It was a big step, but it was necessary, because we could see that PPDM would get very large and be used by people all over the world. We had to make a huge swath of destructive change.”

When Version 3.4 was released in 1997, it was not greeted with acclaim. “There was some resistance to the degree of change, because a lot of application software had been written on older versions of the model,” says Curtis. “People said “You can’t do this, it will cost too much money to re-write everything”. But we needed to establish a benchmark to position the data model for the huge amount of growth that was about to happen. Now, in retrospect, people understand and appreciate why we had to do it, because the model is consistent and allows for increasing levels of consistency.”

Version 3.4 became the foundation for significant growth. “Many companies, including PDVSA (Venezuela), wanted to expand the seismic subject areas,” says Curtis. “Their need was to take information out of proprietary interpretive software and migrate some key information to an open standard. Other impetus was coming from the data management and archiving side. Antonello Lilliu of PDVSA, Paul Coward of EDM Software and Ross Huntley of Imperial Oil co-chaired the seismic workgroup, whose work came out with Version 3.5 in 2001.”

Version 3.4 also served as the launch pad for a Land work group. “The Land special project was co-chaired by Verna Moodie of Petro-Canada and Anne Hand, a professional landman,” says Curtis. “The project started in Version 3.4 and stretched over 3.5 and 3.6. The first cut was mineral land rights, and then surface rights, and finally contracts and obligations. International land experts from the US, South America, Europe and Australia were also key participants.”

The main work of the PPDM Association, the creation of the PPDM Data Model, continued, as member-driven work groups rapidly built up the data model and related guides and support utilities. User documentation, diagrams, sample data and on-line support improved and expanded with each new version. Member-driven list servers were replaced, static documentation was replaced by user driven wiki content, and web based collaborative technologies embraced.

From the beginning, members have needed help to understand and implement the data model. Training and education programmes that started as simple one-day seminars in 1996 have evolved into on-site workshops and classroom training that embody many disciplines. “This is an area that is essential to our success,” says Curtis. “Our members want to find better ways to achieve interoperability, and are driving the need for increasingly technical training content by the PPDM Association.”

As the year 2000 approached, the PPDM Association reached out to the information management community, seeking to build a much larger organization that could carry it well into the next millennium. As it turned out, their timing wasn’t the best. “In 1998, there was a big drop in the price of oil, and Y2K came along,” recalls Fisher. “IT budgets focused on ensuring that existing systems would survive Y2K, and not on longer-term projects like information management.”

+ Maturing the Standard 2001-2009

Maturing the Standard 2001-2009

Collaborative workgroups, once focused exclusively on improving the data model, have been directing their attention to other data management areas, such as standardizing the content of reference tables, creating methods for classifying unstructured data, spatializing data, developing methods and techniques that support data management functions and management reporting functions, and describing key business objects such as wells.

Well drilling technology advanced tremendously as the PPDM standard was being developed. Directional drilling, multi-leg wells and other special well configurations were becoming more and more commonplace. Unfortunately, the terminology used by industry did not keep pace with these changes. “Even though the structure below the surface might contain many well bores, even more completions and a variety of transportation structures (such as production strings), users tended to refer to each component as a “well”,” says Curtis.

Where specialized terminology was created, it tended to be internal to a company or even a department. “Creating clarity about which part of a well you were talking about was increasingly difficult,” says Curtis. “Add to that the wide variety of regulatory environments in which an operator functions, and the problem becomes enormous.”

Steve Cooper, then Chief Communications Officer for the PPDM Association adds, “When we looked at the problem from a company perspective, and added the challenges of the upcoming crew change as data management experts retired, we recognized that the problem was urgent, and had to be solved quickly.” In 2008, the PPDM Association launched ‘What is a Well?’, a new work group. Sponsored by Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Hess, Talisman, EnCana, Shell Canada, and geoLOGIC, the project created some baseline terms and definitions, and examines how different jurisdictions define a well in comparison to the baselines.

“We are looking at how each regulatory body defines and gathers information on wells,” says Curtis. PPDM has reached a critical-mass stage where it covers most major E&P functions. The latest version, PPDM 3.9, released in 2014, includes substantial additions in the areas of Data Management, directional surveys, sample management and laboratory analysis, products and substances,.

During the October 2008 conference in Calgary, PPDM Association members voted to change its name to the Professional Petroleum Data Management Association; the change became official a few months later. Its mandate as a professional society is to ensure that data is managed as a strategic resource by trained and certified professionals.

In 2012, Curtis worked with Jerry Hubbard of Energistics and other industry standards organizations to co-found the Standards Leadership Council. The vision of the Standards Leadership Council is to unite the leaders of the upstream oil and gas industry standards organizations in a collaborative environment promoting the adoption of open standards.

With a network of thousands of data managers world-wide, PPDM focuses on building and supporting the data management community, providing effective standards and best practices, and supporting effective professional development programs.

“The investment we have made over many years through member contribution of dollars and expertise is increasing the ability of the PPDM Association to deliver added value for its members and the petroleum industry,” says Curtis. You can read more about the PPDM Association’s strategies and programs on their website.

+ PPDM Release Dates

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