=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-2969/paper16-ECS
|storemode=property
|title=Towards a Well-Founded Domain Ontology for Offshore Petroleum Production Plants
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2969/paper16-ECS.pdf
|volume=Vol-2969
|authors=Nicolau O. Santos
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/jowo/Santos21
}}
==Towards a Well-Founded Domain Ontology for Offshore Petroleum Production Plants==
<pdf width="1500px">https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2969/paper16-ECS.pdf</pdf>
<pre>
Towards a Well-Founded Domain Ontology for
Offshore Petroleum Production Plants
Nicolau O. Santos1
1
    Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Av. Paulo Gama 110, Farroupilha, Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil




Abstract
The petroleum industry has many challenges to address when it comes to data handling.
The vast number of companies that perform specialized services and use their proprietary
software creates a challenging environment for managing whole chain field data. Thus, a
significant effort has been made to provide a semantic framework for interoperability in the
oil and gas industry, such as the ontology provided by ISO 15926, the integrated data platform
from the Open Subsurface Data Universe Forum (OSDU), and standard glossaries such as the
Professional Petroleum Data Management (PPDM) What is a Well?. Despite such an effort,
accessing integrated data and reasoning over it remains an issue in the offshore environment.
Service companies, operators, and platform leasing companies usually work together, each
with its own siloed systems. Besides several interoperability problems, the lack of a uniform
vocabulary for entities involved in the production process shows a problematic issue. Our work
aims to build a domain ontology of offshore petroleum production plants to address this issue.
The initial scope is material entities and their inhering properties, connecting the subsurface
reservoir and topside equipment. By building the ontology, we intend to help solve modeling
challenges common to ontologies in the industrial domain.
   The development of the domain ontology is following the NeOn Methodology. In this
proposal, we consider a collection of requirements defined in the format of competence questions.
The ontology uses BFO as a top-level ontology and employs the core ontology produced by
the Industry Ontology Foundry (IOF) and GeoCore as middle-level ontologies. We build the
ontology after textual definitions for the terms of the domain provided by ISO 15926-4 and
other publications or glossaries from the oil and gas industry (e.g., Petrowiki, SPE, API, PPDM).
The ontology will provide first-order logic definitions of concepts from the domain and enables
query answering related to production and injection data from wells. We intend the ontology
to rule the tag definitions on monitoring systems, provide labels for annotating databases
from different providers, allow unified queries over various sources, and expand the semantics
involved in machine learning applications.

FOIS 2021 Early Career Symposium (ECS), held at FOIS 2021 - 12th International Conference on Formal Ontology in
Information Systems, September 13-17, 2021, Bolzano, Italy
" nicolau.santos@inf.ufrgs.br (N. O. Santos)
~ https://github.com/nos4397 (N. O. Santos)
 0000-0003-0901-2465 (N. O. Santos)
                                       © 2021 Copyright for this paper by its authors. Use permitted under Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).
    CEUR
    Workshop
    Proceedings
                  http://ceur-ws.org
                  ISSN 1613-0073
                                       CEUR Workshop Proceedings (CEUR-WS.org)
   Up to now, we have performed a meta-property analysis following OntoClean methodology
to guide the initial taxonomy construction. The author acquired 59 competence questions (at
present) and 26 initial modeling terms after eight initial one-and-a-half-hour interviews with
professionals from the partner industry. Formal definitions for the terms are in development. The
author started classifying each of the acquired terms following BFO guidelines and associating
the terms with possible specializations of GeoCore and IOF-Core.
   This research is part of a joint industry-university project to develop a digital twin for
production optimization for the petroleum industry. The ontology is under the process of
formalization and logical consistency validation. We have scheduled a new round of interviews
with stakeholder groups to validate the definitions. The further validation step corresponds to
applying the developed ontology to a use case from a production facility plant located offshore
of Southeast Brazil.


Acknowledgements
The author gratefully acknowledges CAPES and CNPQ, as well as FINEP, Petrobras and Libra
consortium (Petrobras, Shell Brasil; TotalEnergies, CNPC, CNOOC Limited, PPSA) for the
financial support.

</pre>