| Abstract | The System of Industry Metocean data for the Offshore and Research Communities, SIMORC, is an initiative of the Metocean Committee of the International Association of Oil & Gas Producers (OGP). It brings together a wide variety of metocean data and makes them available to the scientific community and industry through a dedicated internet data service.
The service consists of an index metadatabase and a database of actual data sets, both accessible via the internet. The index metadatabase is in the public domain and features a geographic–alphanumeric user interface to locate interesting data sets easily. The Database contains copies of metocean data sets, worldwide gathered by oil & gas companies. However these have undergone extensive quality control and conversion to unified formats, resulting in consistent and high quality, harmonised data sets. Data sets remain the property of the oil & gas companies. Access to the data is regulated by a User Licence Agreement, which gives favourable conditions for access and use of data sets by scientific users for research and educational purposes. Industry users also need to register, albeit that their data requests are always forwarded to the data owners for consent.
SIMORC deals with data from upstream operations the world over. Data come from the North Sea, Mediterranean Sea, Norwegian Sea, and the North Western Atlantic shelf. Beyond Europe data sets are available for major offshore activity areas, such as Caspian Sea, offshore Brazil, China Sea, Australasia, Middle East and offshore Africa. SIMORC already encompasses more than 1200 data sets from several major oil and gas companies.
Benefits:
- SIMORC facilitates systematic indexing of industry metocean datasets and results of field studies, providing easy overview of available datasets.
- SIMORC facilitates systematic archival, providing efficient and harmonised access to available datasets.
- SIMORC facilitates long-term stewardship of industry metocean datasets and results of field studies, including taking measures against degrading of storage media, safeguarding their on-going availability for future applications, such as climate analyses.
- SIMORC facilitates and encourages the exchange between industry and the scientific community, thereby paving the way for knowledge exchange and co-operations.
- SIMORC facilitates validating the quality of existing datasets and harmonising their documentation and formats, thereby improving the opportunities for further use of datasets in integrated studies and analyses. Therefore SIMORC applies internationally agreed standards for quality control, metadata and data formats, that can be adopted by industry and prescribed to contractors for acquiring and delivering new field datasets.
- SIMORC facilitates and encourages exchange of datasets between industry parties, thereby saving costs and adding value to earlier investments in data acquisition.
- SIMORC encourages relationships between industry and developing countries by providing datasets, that can be used by local and regional communities for analysing their local systems and for educational purposes. This is strngthened by a dedicated SIMORC training module as part of UNESCO’s IODE OceanTeacher programme.
- SIMORC complements the activities of the international scientific and governmental communities for implementing infrastructures for indexing and sharing marine and ocean datasets worldwide.
SIMORC’s Service has been developed from June 2005 till end 2007 with cofunding by the European Commission via the SIMORC project. |
