"Qui peut le plus, peut le moins" or "Horses for courses"

These quips mean that, while we may have great tools for complex workflows, such as Mapping Well Data I'll present as AAPG Visiting Geoscientist in Hungary next month, sometimes it's better to pare it down to its simplest form, such as for a friend "looking to map addresses to [a French geographic subdivision]".

Development of Spatial Grids and...

The Association for Geographic Information Geocom2017 gathered at the Geographical Society in London late last October. Its Lightning Talks showcased new ideas and businesses. I was invited there to challenge attendees "to think about the development of spatial grids and the structure of spatial data models". The presentation itself and thank-you letter were followed by a short report in GIS Professional scanned here:

"Data and Maps: a simpler Workflow"

[Note: this complements Part III of A Day in the Life of...  ongoing blog post series here]

A day in the life of a petroleum professional - Part III - shorthand

[2018 Update -  presented at AAPG Visiting Geoscientist Program in Budapest in 2015 and Szeged in 2018 with open data for 2014 and 2018.

2016 Update - PUGonline Geospatial Workflow catalog summarised this as: Development & Planning > Mapping Well Data

2015 Update - A higher level article is published by PPDM Foundations in its Q4 2015 issue]

This is Part III of a "A day in the life of..." posts, to introduce basic petroleum data management for professionals who generate prospects. This is a yet even simpler workflow that helps rapid project start-ups for prospectors rather than data managers.

A day in the life of a petroleum professional - Part II - shorthand

[Update: posted here an even simpler workflow that reads government data direct from web]

This is Part II of a A day in the life of posts, to introduc Basic petroleum data manipulation for professionals who aren't data managers. This is however a much simpler workflow that lends itself more to rapid project start-ups for petroleum rather than data professionals.

A day in the life of a petro-data manager - Part I - Shorthand

[Update: a simpler workflow that uses  for-fee & for-free software is posted here]

After intoducing the process to extract, transform & load  (ETL) www.boem.gov well data into a www.ppdm.org database, here is the short version expanded over on my sister blog.

A day in the life of a petro-data manager - intro

[Update: Talend made the early version complex, so simpler one was posted later]

Have you ever been given plain text geodata and wondered how to database and map it? And has this happened to you lately with tens of thousands of lines of data? Well help is at hand! Here is an ETL  workflow (extract, transform, load) useful to any data manager in or out of petroleum using free tools:

Simple Feature or Full Feature Specification for OGC?

The issue of how to write-to and read-from geographic databases has been around for quite some time. Esri shapefiles were a runaway success partly because of their open specification. As we moved onto spatial databases, the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) offered the simple feature specification (SFS) that all the players could read to or write from. This came in especially handy for consuming web mapping services (those and many other specifications have grown since). But it gets trickier when it comes to reading from and writing to spatial databases generically. By that I mean not from the native application but from others', like with shape files.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch...

Time for reflection coming up to the anniversary of reconnecting with my current business partner David Lloyd to help oilelefant to market.

Standards & Metadata - Part VII

Facebook/twitter diary excerpt from an information manager:

Vast majority of information is not held on computers but in people's heads
If Information is Communication, then what is Metadata?
Monday E&P IM mantra: METADATA. METADATA. METADATA
Data, data everywhere. Hidden. [...] High value. Low awareness
Would like to take a broom to the data management techniques used

Web 2.0 in action

The recent announcement of data.gov.uk under none other than Tim Berners-Lee is a great step towards freeing UK data to the public - I won't reiterate the arguments going back and forth between for-free (tax-paid) and for-fee (cost recovery) - and such availability has raised eyebrows even in the land of the free - namely, how useful is it to the end-user ranging from guv contractor, thru spatial business to end-users, perhaps in decreasing order of patience &/or savvy?

Standards & Metadata - Part VI

A fable by Paolo Coelho inspired this post, a follow-on to Part V. Here is an excerpt from his e-book Stories for Parents, Children and Grandchildren - Volume 1.

What's in a name? Part II

Tim O’Reilly started the Web 2.0 movement via eponymous show a few years ago. Gov 2.0 was his iteration of same in Washington DC last week. In the All Points Blog podcast on same, APB Executive Editor Adena Schutzberg said:

...not only are they [gov. GIS sites] really, really useful, people don't think of them as GIS, they're apps: they happen to have maps in them, you get your answers to your questions...

Standards & Metadata - Part V

A quick follow-on to my series of same name posted here - I had a long email trail with a potential partner about serving up petrodata on the web, and here are a few lessons learned: