Petroleum GIS User Group Convenes to Learn Latest Technology and Application Trends for Energy Indus

ESRI president Jack Dangermond’s video address to more than 1,600 PUG Conference attendees described the evolution of ESRI’s ArcGIS 9.x into a framework for geographic-enabled decision making. He described the upcoming release of the ArcGIS 9.3 software version, with its attention to quality for improved workflows, better access to data, and enhancements for Web-enabled GIS applications.

“The technology ESRI is developing will expand smart client access to Web services and help people use them in an easy way,” Dangermond said. “It will proliferate the use of GIS knowledge so that geophysicists, seismologists, and geologists who may have little knowledge of how GIS works can still easily use it for research and other exploration and development activities.”

Charles Fried, chair of the PUG Steering Group and information assurance manager at BP, spoke of changing GIS trends for petroleum users. “Use of GIS is steadily increasing in the petroleum industry. This is real,” said Fried. “Many geoscientists and geologists now use it on a daily basis. If GIS is going to work in our harried environment, it needs to be simple to use, collaborative, integrative with workflows, reliable, dependable, and predictable. There is steady progress. Yet, as always, there is more to do.”

Keynote speaker Clint Brown, ESRI’s director of product engineering, noted, “The evolution of GIS has been driven by ESRI’s devotion to solving its customers’ problems. The PUG has been meeting with ESRI for more than two decades. Its members have provided essential input that has helped steer the direction of our software development efforts. The solutions have enriched analytical capabilities and created a visual window into the corporate databases in many organizations around the world with intelligent tools. The next step of ArcGIS 9.3 brings a new perspective, a change of mind-set about bringing GIS-based Web services into the corporate environment. A rich set of applications can be delivered via ArcGIS Server technology to many clients.”

ESRI technical professionals demonstrated how ArcGIS lets users readily author data, maps, globes, and models on the desktop; serve them to a GIS server; and use them through Web, desktop, and mobile clients. Developers can easily design executive dashboards for management that allow them to quickly access data such as well production, pipeline schematics, and lease lands, which helps quickly identify output and potential opportunities. ESRI also showed how ArcGIS Server and ArcGIS Explorer provide a framework that makes it possible for users to draw on a wide variety of data sources and create mashups, which help them examine all types of data relationships. Spotlighting Job Tracking for ArcGIS (JTX), presenters gave examples of how petroleum users can track an entire workflow process, incorporating a host of project-related variables.

During the three-day PUG Conference, people representing 487 organizations and 30 countries participated in workshops and technical presentations, met with GIS business partners, and grew their networks with peers in the petroleum industry.