W3C Workshop on Semantic Web in Energy Industries;
Part I: Oil & Gas
Call for Participation

December 9-10, 2008, hosted by Chevron at 1600 Smith Street, Houston, Texas, USA

Status update, 2008-12-05: Submission and registration is now closed. Please, consult the Workshop agenda and Workshop report for further details.

Background

The Oil & Gas (O&G) industry produces a staggering amount of new data every day from a variety of activities such as drilling, exploration and production, reservoir management, major capital projects, facility and downstream operations. The problem of information explosion and overload presents an ever increasing challenge in finding and analyzing information quickly and precisely in order to get the most value for the business. This problem is not unique to the O&G industry; much the same can be said, for example, about the Health Care and Life Science (HCLS) industry, which has embraced Semantic Web technology in order to unite many forms of biological and medical information across diverse industries and institutions through the encoding of meaning into the data and their interpretations. The fundamental question is how Semantic Web technologies might play a similar role in the further development of energy resources. To explore this, W3C hosts workshops with specific focus on industry areas to discuss what directions and methodologies each industry should take and how to achieve maximum benefit. The first of these workshops focusses on the Oil and Gas industry. From these workshops, the creation of one or more W3C Interest or Working groups will be explored as a possible way to move forward.

Goal of Workshop

The high level goal of this workshop is to gather and share possible use cases and/or case studies for Semantic Web in the O&G industry in order to understand the business drivers and benefits of using Semantic Web in that particular area of industry. The Workshop should also explore whether it is worthwhile to consider the creation of an Interest or Working Group under the auspices of W3C, and whether the workshop participants will have gathered enough information for their companies to decide whether to commit substantial resources to such an effort.

To this end, Workshop participants will:

• Discuss current business issues around connecting information from highly diverse sources;
• Consider how automated inference might help to solve particular business problems;
• Present use cases for Semantic Web technologies and standards as used or explored in this industry branch;
• Share current experience with using Semantic Web technologies and standards;
• Identify current taxonomies or ontologies that could support Semantic Web implementations in the O&G industry;
• Discuss the potential pragmatic impact of Semantic Web for O&G;
  • Identify low hanging fruit
  • Prioritize potential areas of application
• Identify key target audiences and their needs. For instance:
  • End users (operations, management, R&D)
  • Business partners (suppliers, contractors, operators)
  • IT (architects, analysts, developers)
• Outline the possible roles for W3C, for participating companies and organizations, and identify next steps

Scope of Workshop

The Workshop will focus on these four areas:

1. Use cases for O&G industry
2. Case studies and implementation experiences in O&G
3. Pragmatic impact of Semantic Web technologies and standards for O&G
4. Business cases

Audience

W3C encourages people interested in the topics list in the goal and scope sections to participate in the Workshop.

Requirements for Participation

• There is no participation fee, but registration is required. Registration instructions will be sent to submitters of position papers.
• W3C membership is not required in order to participate in the Workshop.
• Each participant must submit (or be co-submitter of) a position paper.
• The total number of participants will be limited. To ensure diversity, a limit may be imposed on the maximum number of participants per organization.
• Press representatives must contact w3t-pr@w3.org.

Position Papers

Position papers are the basis for the discussion at the Workshop. Position papers must be submitted no later than 30 September 2008. These papers will also be made available to the public (see also published position papers from previous W3C workshops). Submitting a paper constitutes recognition of the terms of this Call for Participation about publication of the position paper. Late submission of position papers may be accepted depending on space availability. Any accepted late submission won't be considered for the workshop program.

Position papers must be submitted via email to team-ogws@w3.org, an archived mailing list accessible to the W3C staff. Note that the system might ask you (via reply email) to confirm your submission. Don't hesitate to contact Ivan Herman (ivan@w3.org) before 30 September if you think your submission got lost.

The Program Committee may ask the authors of particularly salient position papers to explicitly present their position at the Workshop. Presenters will be asked to make the slides of any presentations available to the public in HTML, PDF, or plain text.

Format

All papers should be 1 to 5 pages, although they may link to longer versions or appendixes. They must be in English. Allowed formats are HTML/XHTML, PDF, or plain text.

Workshop Organization

Workshop sessions and documents will be in English.

Chairs:

Frank Chum, Chevron
Bertrand du Castel, Schlumberger
Ivan Herman, W3C

Program Committee

Robin Benjamins, Bechtel
Jeremy Carroll, TopQuandrant
Yanni Charalambous, Occidental Petroleum
Kendall Clark, Clark & Parsia
Roger Cutler, Chevron
Alan Doniger, Energistics
Roar Fjellheim, Computas, AS
James Jones, BP
Emilio J Nunez, U. of Texas at Austin
Onno Paap, Fluor Corp.
Nils Sandsmark, DNV

Deliverables

Position papers, agenda, accepted presentations, and report will also be published online.

Important Dates

Frank Chum, Bertrand du Castel, and Ivan Herman, Workshop Co-chairs

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