Semantic interoperability in the norwegian petroleum industry

Abstract

The petroleum industry is a technically challenging business with high investments, complex projects and operational structures. There are numerous companies and public offices involved in the exploitation of a new oil field, and there is a high degree of specialization among them. Even though standardization has been considered important in this industry for many years, there is still very little integration across phases and disciplines. An industrially driven consortium launched the Integrated Information Platform project in 2004, in which semantic standards based on OWL and Semantic Web technologies were to be developed for the subsea petroleum industry. This paper presents the IIP project in more detail and discusses how industry-wide ontologies can support semantic interoperability and encourage more process integration.