European Association of Geoscientists and Engineers Conference Proceedings - London.

DUBLIN, Ireland -- Research and Markets (http://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/3a4e33/european_associati) has announced the addition of the "European Association of Geoscientists and Engineers (EAGE) Conference Proceedings 2007 - London" report to their offering.

The 2007 EAGE/SPE-Eupropec conference and exhibition in London's Docklands saw growth in oil companies' recruitment efforts to the extent that the geography of the trade show floor has changed. The Schlumbergers and Halliburtons have been displaced from the center of the exhibition floor by the majors' plush stands. The trend for more specialized computer hardware continues. One estimate has around 70 petabytes of oil and gas data stored on disk. Despite a 64bit address space, workstations with over 16GB of memory remain very expensive and anyway, project data volumes are so high that just loading data to memory at project startup takes far too long. One answer is to store data across a disk cluster and avoid the RAM bottleneck (see for instance Paradigm's High Performance Volume Interpretation). IBM was showing a prolific hardware and web software offering including its Blue Gene TOP500 winner. Sun Microsystems has returned to the oil and gas vertical after a short interruption in service. RIM now has an oil and gas sales drive for Blackberry users to be able to connect to SCADA systems while on the road, or fill out their SAP expense forms.

On the seismic interpretation front, modeling while interpreting is a hot topic with offerings from a rapidly expanding Ikon Science and a newly commercial NORSAR. Landmark has announced a new OpenWorks data model for later this year. The issue of managing the results of interpretation was the subject of a Schlumberger-Statoil presentation that, while centered on Schlumberger's DecisionPoint, rolled in a range of third party software tools. New packages include the TGS Aceca Facies Map Browser and Zeh/Horizon's Geological Information Management System (GIMS).

The web is everywhere, with a range of WITSML and web-services offerings including Kongsberg's Discovery Portal and a new well data service announced by Kadme and Digital Earth (backed by a former IHS Energy president). Looking to the future, the semantic web is visible on the R&D horizon with the IFP 'Archeo-Modeling' JIP proposal and a semantic web study on knowledge management of shared earth models.

While information and data management papers were rather thin on the ground, one presentation by Total described solving the data management puzzle and offered an interesting critique of vendors' 'non-imbricated' solutions. A paper by Midland Valley described 'concept uncertainty' in seismic interpretation to conclude that much of today's 'uncertainty management' may hide the real problem of misidentification of tectonic settings. A survey showed that only one in five interpreters correctly identified a seismic test line.

The EAGE held a meeting of the SEG-D Rev 3 committee. But on the standards front, a newcomer has appeared in the form of the Hungarian Eotvos Institute which has been working of geophysical metadata - targeting a new ISO standard.

Key Topics Covered:

- Exhibitors - Software
- Exhibitors - Hardware and Storage
- Exhibitors - other
- Papers of note
- SEG D Rev 3 update
- Technology Watch Subscription Information

For more information visit http://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/3a4e33/european_associati