Agile* is closing

After almost 12 years of consulting, teaching, writing, and hacking, it’s time for Agile* to close its laptops for the last time. We’ll be shutting down at the end of September.

When I quit my job and moved to Nova Scotia in 2010, I had no idea if Agile* was going to work at all. I knew there was a chance I’d be looking for work within a year, possibly even having to move back to Calgary, or on to somewhere else to find it. But with Evan — and later Ben, Justin, Kara, Tracy, Diego, Martin and Rob — we did more than just survive. We built a solid business providing services to governments, startups, and global corporations, as well as training, community events, and open source software to students and seasoned professionals alike. I think we had an impact well beyond our small size. And it was fun.

I’m so grateful to the global community of earth scientists and engineers that cheered us on, read the blog, bought the books, and hired us for work. If you’re reading this, you’ve almost certainly been part of it. Thank you. It’s not an exaggeration to say that all of it would have been impossible without your cheers, loud or soft.

You may be wondering what’s next. I’m excited to share that my family and I are moving back to Norway. Although I’ll always be a geoscientist at heart, I’m switching careers and joining Equinor as a software developer. I’m looking forward to learning tons and finding new ways to apply myself and, I hope, contributing to Equinor’s inspiring open source software program. For sure I’ll still be around the Software Underground on a daily basis. Maybe I’ll even keep blogging.

For now though, I’m going on holiday. Have an awesome summer 🚀

Matt and Evan at the Paris hackathon in 2017.

Will a merger save SEG, AAPG and SPE?

Earlier this year AAPG and SPE announced that they are considering a merger.

Read the PRESS RELEASE and FAQs about the AAPG and SPE merger considerations at: https://t.co/9tAQFKeERt. pic.twitter.com/2RwJCTjjnh

— AAPG (@AAPG) May 25, 2021

There’s now a dedicated website to help members follow the developments, but it looks like no decisions will be made before next year, following a member vote on the issue.

In a LinkedIn post from SEG President Anna Shaughnessy earlier this week, I learned that SEG is joining the discussion. This move is part of a strategic review, led by President-Elect Ken Tubman. The new Strategic Options task force will have plenty to talk about.

It seems the pandemic, alongside the decline of petroleum, has been hard on the technical societies — just like it has on everyone. Annual meetings, which are usually huge sources of revenue, were cancelled, and I’m sure membership and sponsorship levels overall are down (actual data on this is hard to find). So will this merger help?

In contravention of Betteridge’s law of headlines, and more in line with classical geophysical thinking, I think the answer is, ‘It depends’.

The problem

As I’ve highlighted several times in the past, the societies — and I’m mostly talking about AAPG, SEG, SPE, and EAGE here — have been struggling with relevance for a while. I’m generalizing here, but in my view the societies have been systematically failing to meet the changing needs of their respective communities of practice for at least the last decade. They have not modernized, and in particular not understood that technology and the Internet have changed everything. Evidence: none of them have functioning online communities, none of them stream their conferences to make them more accessible, none of them understand the importance of open scientific publishing, they all have patchy equity & diversity records, and they all have rather equivocal stances on climate change. The main problem, to my mind, is that they tend to have a strongly inward-looking perspective, seeing everything in terms of revenue.

In summary, and to spin it more positively: there’s a massive opportunity here. But it’s not at all clear to me how merging two or more struggling societies creates one that’s ready for tomorrow.

The catch

The pattern is pretty familiar. Corporations in trouble often go for what they think are big, daring ideas (they aren’t big or daring, but let’s leave that for another time). Acquire! Merge! Fire the COO! Shuffle the VPs! What follows is months of uncertainty, HR meetings, legal nonsense, rumour-mongering, marketing focus groups, and a million-dollar rebranding. Oh, and “a stronger organization that can more effectively address the challenges our industry faces today and into the future”. (Right?? Surely we get that too?)

So there’s a pretty clear downside to survival-by-negotiation, and that’s the absolutely Titanic distraction from the real work — specifically from the actual needs and aspirations of your members, employees, partners, supporters, and the community at large.

There’s also the very real possibility that the organization emerging from the process is not actually fit for purpose. Reading the FAQ in the AAPG/SPE press release doesn’t fill me with hope:

Maybe I’m wrong, but I don’t think most members are worrying about how AAPG can grow its customer base.

The alternative

Now, to be clear, I am not a growth-oriented business-person — and I’m not against big organizations per se. But during the pandemic, size did not seem to be an advantage for technical societies. The cancellation of All The Meetings last year just highlighted how fragile these giant meetings are. And how difficult the high stakes made everything — just look at how AAPG struggled to manage the cancellation process long after it was obvious that their annual convention would be impossible to host in person. Meanwhile, Software Underground’s 3000 members immediately pivoted its two planned hackathons into an awesome virtual conference that attracted hundreds of new people to its cause.

Notwithstanding that things might be at a crisis point in these organizations, in which case some emergency measures might be called for, my advice is to press pause on the merger and dig into the fundamentals. The most urgent thing is to resist the temptation to attempt to figure it all out by shutting a select committee of hand-picked leaders in a room in Tulsa because that will definitely result in more of the same. These organizations must, without delay, get into honest, daily conversation with their communities (notice I didn’t say, ‘send out a questionnaire’ — I’m using words like ‘conversation’ on purpose).

If I was a member of these organizations, here’s what I would want to ask them:

What would happen if the organization only worked on things that really matter to the community of practice? All of it, that is — not just your sponsors, or your employees, or your committees, or even your members. What if you connected your community through daily conversation? Emphasized diversity and inclusion? Stood up emphatically for minorities? Brought essential technical content to people that could not reach it or afford it before? Founds new ways for people to participate and contribute — and not just “attend”? What if you finally joined the scientific publishing revolution with an emphasis on reproducible research? Started participating in the global effort to mitigate the effects of climate change? Shone a light on CCS, geothermal, mining, and the multitude of other applications of subsurface science and engineering?

It might sound easier to fiddle with corporate documents, rebrand the website, or negotiate new trade-show deals — and maybe it is, if you’re a corporate lawyer, web developer, or events planner. But your community consists of scientists that want you to support and amplify them as they lead subsurface science and engineering into the future. That’s your purpose.

If you’re not up for that now, when will you be up for it?

New virtual training for digital geoscience

Looking to skill up before 2022 hits us with… whatever 2022 is planning? We have quite a few training classes coming up — don’t miss out! Our classes use 100% geoscience data and examples, and are taught exclusively by earth scientists.

We’re also always happy to teach special classes in-house for you and your colleagues. Just get in touch.

Special classes for CSEG in Calgary

• CSEG Crash Course, 7 to 10 September — there are no prerequisites for this class.

• CSEG Doodle Train on 1 to 4 November — this class assumes you’ve taken the crash course, or have some basic Python and NumPy skills.

Public classes with timing for Americas

• Geocomputing: week of 22 November

• Machine Learning: week of 6 December

Public classes with timing for Europe, Africa and Middle East

• Geocomputing: week of 27 September

• Machine Learning: week of 8 November

So far we’ve taught 748 people on the Geocomputing class, and 445 on the Machine Learning class — this wave of new digital scientists is already doing fascinating new work and publishing new research. I’m very excited to see what unfolds over the next year or two!

Find out more about Agile’s public classes by clicking this big button:

How can technical societies support openness?

There’s an SPE conference on openness happening this week. Around 60 people paid the $400 registration fee — does that seem like a lot for a virtual conference? — and it’s mostly what you’d expect: talks and panel discussions. But there’s 20 minutes per day for open discussion, and we must be grateful for small things! For sure, it is always good to see the technical societies pay attention to open data, open source code, and open access content.

But what really matters is action, and in my breakout room today I asked about SPE’s role in raising the community’s level of literacy around openness. Someone asked in turn what sorts of things the organization could do. I said my answer needed to be written down 😄 so here it is.

To save some breath, I’m going to use the word openness to talk about open access content, open source code, and open data. And when I say ‘open’, I mean that something meets the Open Definition. In a nutshell, this states:

“Open data and content can be freely used, modified, and shared by anyone for any purpose”

Remember that ‘free’ here means many things, but not necessarily ‘free of charge’.

So that we don’t lose sight of the forest for the tree, my advice boils down to this: I would like to see all of the technical societies understand and embrace the idea that openness is an important way for them to increase their reach, improve their accessibility, become more equitable, increase engagement, and better serve their communities of practice.

No, ‘increase their revenue’ is not on that list. Yes, if they do those things, their revenue will go up. (I’ve written about the societies’ counterproductive focus on revenue before.)

Okay, enough preamble. What can the societies do to better serve their members? I can think of a few things:

• Advocate for producers of the open content and technology that benefits everyone in the community.

• Help member companies understand the role openness plays in innovation and help them find ways to support it.

• Take a firm stance on expectations of reproducibility for journal articles and conference papers.

• Provide reasonable, affordable options for authors to choose open licences for their work (and such options must not require a transfer of copyright).

• When open access papers are published, be clear about the licence. (I could not figure out the licence on the current most read paper in SPE Journal, although it says ‘open access’.)

• Find ways to get well-informed legal advice about openness to members (this advice is hard to find; most lawyers are not well informed about copyright law, nevermind openness).

• Offer education on openness to members.

• Educate editors, associate editors, and meeting convenors on openness so that they can coach authors, reviewers., and contributors.

• Improve peer review machinery to better support the review of code and data submissions.

• Highlight exemplary open research projects, and help project maintainers improve over time. (For example, what would it take to accelerate MRST’s move to an open language? Could SPE help create those conditions?)

• Recognize that open data benchmarks are badly needed and help organize labour around them.

• Stop running data science contests that depend on proprietary data.

• Put an open licence on PetroWiki. I believe this was Apache’s intent when they funded it, hence the open licences on AAPG Wiki and SEG Wiki. (Don’t get me started on the missed opportunity of the SEG/AAPG/SPE wikis.)

• Allow more people from more places to participate in events, with sympathetic pricing, asynchronous activities, recorded talks, etc. It is completely impossible for a great many engineers to participate in this openness workshop.

• Organize more events around openness!

I know that SPE, like the other societies, has some way to go before they really internalize all of this. That’s normal — change takes time. But I’m afraid there is some catching up to do. The petroleum industry is well behind here, and none of this is really new — I’ve been banging on about it for a decade and I think of myself as a newcomer to the openness party. Jon Claerbout and Paul de Groot must be utterly exhausted by the whole thing!

The virtual conference this week is an encouraging step in the right direction, as are the recent SPE datathons (notwithstanding what I said about the data). Although it’s a late move — making me wonder if it’s an act of epiphany or of desperation — I’m cautiously encouraged. I hope the trend continues and picks up pace. And I’m looking forward to more debate and inspiration as the week goes on.

Projects from the Geothermal Hackathon 2021

The second Geothermal Hackathon happened last week. Timed to coincide with the Geosciences virtual event of the World Geothermal Congress, our 2-day event brought about 24 people together in the famous Software Underground Chateau (I’m sorry if I missed anyone!). For comparison, last year we were 13 people, so we’re going in the right direction! Next time I hope we’re as big as one of our ‘real world’ events — maybe we’ll even be able to meet up in local clusters.

Here’s a rundown of the projects at this year’s event:

Induced seismicity at Espoo, Finland

Alex Hobé, Mohsen Bazagan and Matteo Niccoli

Alex’s original workflow for creating dynamic displays of microseismic events was to create thousands of static images then stack them into a movie, so the first goal was something more interactive. On Day 1 Alex built a Plotly widget with a time zoomer/slider in a Jupyter Notebook. On day 2 he and Matteo tried Panel for a dynamic 3D plot. Alex then moved the data into LLNL Visit for fully interactive 3D plots. The team continues to hack on the idea.

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Fluid inclusions at Coso, USA

Diana Acero-Allard, Jeremy Zhao, Samuel Price, Lawrence Kwan, Jacqueline Floyd, Brendan, Gavin, Rob Leckenby and Martin Bentley

Diana had the idea of a gas analysis case study for Coso Field, USA. The team’s specific goal was to develop visualization tools for interetpaton of fluid inclusion gas data to identify fluid types, regions of permeability, and geothermal processes. They had access to analyses from 29 wells, requiring the usual data science workflow: find and load the data, clean the data, make some visualizations and maps, and finally analyse the permeability. GitHub repo here.

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Utah Forge data pipeline

Andrea Balza, Evan Bianco, and Diego Castañeda

Andrea was driven to dive into the Utah FORGE project. Navigating the OpenEI data portal was a bit hit-and-miss, having to download files to get into ZIP files and so on (this is a common issue with open data repositories). The team eventually figured out how to programmatically access the files to explore things more easily — right from a Jupyter Notebook. Their code for any data on the OpenEI site, not just Utah FORGE, so it’s potentially a great research tool. GitHub repo here.

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Pythonizing a power density estimation tool

Irene Wallis, Jan Niederau, Hannah Wood, Will Middlebrook, Jeff Jex, and Bill Cummings

Like a lot of cool hackathon projects, this one started with spreadsheet that Bill created to simplify the process of making power density estimates for geothermal fields under some statistical assumptions. Such a clear goal always helps focus the mind and the team put together some Python notebooks and then a Streamlit app — which you can test-drive here! From this solid foundation, the team has plenty of plans for new directions to take the tool. GitHub repo here.

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Computing boiling point for depth

Thorsten Hörbrand, Irene Wallis, Jan Niederau and Matt Hall

Irene identified the need for a Python tool to generate boiling-point-for-depth curves, accommodating various water salinities and chemistries. As she showed during her recent TRANSFORM tutorial (which you must watch!), so-called BPD curves are an important part of geothermal well engineering. The team produced some scripts to compute various scenarios, based on corrections in the IAPWS standards and using the PHREEQC aqueous geochemistry modeling software. GitHub repo here.

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A big Thank You to all of the hackers that came along to this virtual event. Not quite the same as a meatspace hackathon, admittedly, but Gather.town + Slack was definitely an improvement over Zoom + Slack. At least we have an environment in which people can arrive and immediately get a sense of what is happening in the event. When you realize that people at the tables are actually sitting in Canada, the US, the UK, Switzerland, South Africa, and Auckland — it’s clear that this could become an important new way to collaborate across large distances.

Do check out all these awesome and open-source projects — and check out the #geothermal channel in the Software Underground to keep up with what happens next. We’ll be back in the future — perhaps the near future! — with more hackathons and more geothermal technology. Hopefully we’ll see you there! 🌋

Future proof

Last week I wrote about the turmoil many subsurface professionals are experiencing today. There’s no advice that will work for everyone, but one thing that changed my life (ok, my career at least) was learning a programming language. Not only because programming computers is useful and fun, but also because of the technology insights it brings. Whether you’re into data management or machine learning, workflow automation or just being a more rounded professional, there really is no faster way to build digital muscles!

Six classes

We have six public classes coming up in the next few weeks. But there are thousands of online and virtual classes you can take — what’s different about ours? Here’s what I think:

• All of the instructors are geoscientists, and we have experience in sedimentology, geophysics, and structural geology. We’ve been programming in Python for years, but we remember how it felt to learn it for the first time.

• We refer to subsurface data and typical workflows throughout the class. We don’t use abstract or unfamiliar examples. We focus 100% on scientific computing and data visualization. You can get a flavour of our material from the X Lines of Python blog series.

• We want you to be self-sufficient, so we give you everything you need to start being productive right away. You’ll walk away with the full scientific Python stack on your computer, and dozens of notebooks showing you how to do all sorts of things from loading data to making a synthetic seismogram.

Let’s look at what we have on offer.

Upcoming classes

We have a total of 6 public classes coming up, in two sets of three classes: one set with timing for North, Central and South America, and one set with timing for Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. Here they are:

• Intro to Geocomputing, 5 half-days, 15–19 Feb — 🌎 Timing for Americas — 🌍 Timing for Europe & Africa — If you’re just getting started in scientific computing, or are coming to Python from another language, this is the class for you. No prerequisites.

• Digital Geology with Python, 4 half-days, 22–25 Feb — 🌍 Timing for Europe & Africa — A closer look at geological workflows using Python. This class is for scientists and engineers with some Python experience.

• Digital Geophysics with Python, 4 half-days, 22–25 Feb — 🌎 Timing for Americas — We get into some geophysical workflows using Python. This class is for quantitative scientists with some Python experience.

• Machine Learning for Subsurface, 4 half-days in March — 🌎 Timing for Americas (1–4 Mar) — 🌍 Timing for Europe & Africa (8–11 Mar) — The best way into machine learning for earth scientists and subsurface engineers. We give you everything you need to manage your data and start exploring the world of data science and machine learning.

Follow the links above to find out more about each class. We have space for 14 people in each class. You find pricing options for students and those currently out of work. If you are in special circumstances, please get in touch — we don’t want price to be a barrier to these classes.

In-house options

If you have more than about 5 people to train, it might be worth thinking about an in-house class. That way, the class is full of colleagues learning things together — they can speak more openly and share more freely. We can also tailor the content and the examples to your needs more easily.

Get in touch if you want more info about this approach.

Openness is a two-way street

Last week the Data Analysis Study Group of the SPE Gulf Coast Section announced a new machine learning contest (I’m afraid registration is now closed, even though the contest has not started yet). The task is to predict shear-wave sonic from other logs, similar to the SPWLA PDDA contest last year. This is a valuable problem in the subsurface, because shear sonic log is essential for computing elastic properties of rocks and therefore in predicting rock and fluid properties or processing seismic. Indeed, TGS have built a business on predicted logs with their ARLAS product. There’s money in log prediction!

The task looks great, but there’s one big problem: the dataset is not open.

Why is this a problem?

Before answering that, let’s look at some context.

What’s a machine learning contest?

Good question. Typically, an organization releases a dataset (financial timeseries, Netflix viewer data, medical images, or whatever). They invite people to predict some valuable property (when to sell, which show to recommend, how to treat the illness, or whatever). And they pick the best, measured against known labels on a hidden dataset.

Kaggle is one of the largest platforms hosting such challenges, and they often attract thousands of participants — competing for large prizes. TGS ran a seismic salt-picking contest on the platform, attracting almost 74,000 submissions from 3220 teams with a $100k prize purse. Other contests are more grass-roots, like the one I ran with Brendon Hall in 2016 on lithology prediction, and like this SPE contest. It’s being run by a team of enthusiasts without a lot of resources from SPE, and the prize purse is only $1000 — representing about 3 hours of the fully loaded G&A of an oil industry professional.

What has this got to do with reproducibility?

Contests that award a large prize in return for solving a hard problem are essentially just a kind of RFP-combined-with-consulting-job. It’s brutally inefficient: hundreds or even thousands of people spend hours on the problem for free, and a handful are financially rewarded. These contests attract a lot of attention, but I’m not that interested in them.

Community-oriented events like this SPE contest — and the recent FORCE one that Xeek hosted — are more interesting and I believe they are more impactful. They have lots of great outcomes:

• Lots of people have fun working on a hard problem and connecting with each other.

• Solutions are often shared after, or even during, the contest, so that everyone learns and grows their toolbox.

• A new open dataset that might even become a much-needed benchmark for the task in hand.

• Researchers can publish what they did, or do later. (The SEG ML contest tutorial and results article have 136 citations between them, largely from people revisiting the dataset to show new solutions.)

A lot of new open-source machine learning code is always exciting, but if the data is not open then the work is by definition not reproducible. It seems especially unfair — cheeky, even — to ask participants to open-source their code, but to keep the data proprietary. For sure TGS is interested in how these free solutions compare to their own product.

Well, life’s not fair. Why is this a problem?

The data is being shared with the contest participants on the condition that they may not share it. In other words it’s proprietary. That means:

• Participants are encumbered with the liability of a proprietary dataset. Sure, TGS is sharing this data in good faith today, but who knows how future TGS lawyers will see it after someone accidentally commits it to their GitHub repo? TGS is a billion-dollar company, they will win a legal argument with you. (Having said that, there’s no NDA or anything, just a checkbox in a form. I don’t know how binding it really is… but I don’t want to be the one that finds out.)

• Participants can’t publish reproducible papers on their own work. They can publish classic oil-indsutry, non-reproducible work — I did this thing but no-one can check it because I can’t give you the data — but do we really need more of that? (In the contest introductory Zoom, someone asked about publishing plots of the data. The answer: “It should be fine.” Are we really still this naive about data?)

If anyone from TGS is reading this and thinking, “Come on, we’re not going to sue anyone — we’re not GSI! — it’s fine :)” then my response is: Wonderful! In that case, why not just formalize everything by releasing the data under an open licence — preferably Creative Commons Attribution 4.0? (Unmodified! Don’t make the licensing mistakes that Equinor and NAM have made recently.) That way, everyone knows their rights, everyone can safely download the data, and the community can advance. And TGS looks pretty great for contributing an awesome dataset to the subsurface machine learning community.

I hope TGS decides to release the data with an open licence. If they don’t, it feels like a rather one-sided deal to me. And with the arrangement as it stands, there’s no way I would enter this contest.

Looking forward to 2021

I usually write a ‘lookback’ at this time of year, but who wants to look back on 2#*0? Instead, let’s look forward to 2021 and speculate wildly about it!

More ways to help

Agile has always been small and nimble, but the price we pay is bandwidth: it’s hard to help all the people we want to help. But we’ve taught more than 1250 people Python and machine learning since 2018, and supporting this new community of programmers is our priority. Agile will be offering some new services in the new year, all aimed at helping you ‘just in time’ — what you need, when you need it — so that those little glitches don’t hold you up. The goal is to accelerate as many people as possible, but to be awesome value. Stay tuned!

We are still small, but we did add a new scientist to the team this year: Martin Bentley joined us. Martin is a recent MSc geology graduate from Nelson Mandela University in Port Elizabeth, South Africa. He’s also a very capable Python programmer and GIS wizard, as well as a great teacher, and he’s a familiar face around the Software Underground too.

All over the world

While we’ll be making ourselves available in new ways in 2021, we’ll continue our live classes too — but we’ll be teaching in more accessible ways and in more time zones. This year we taught 29 virtual classes for people based in Los Angeles, Calgary, Houston, Bogotá, Rio de Janeiro, Glasgow, London, Den Haag, Krakow, Lagos, Brunei, Muscat, Tunis, Kuala Lumpur, and Perth. Next year I want to add Anchorage, Buenos Aires, Durban, Reykjavik, Jakarta, and Wellington. The new virtual world has really driven home to me how inaccessible our classes and events were — we will do better!

Public classes appear here when we schedule them: https://agilescientific.com/training

Maximum accessibility

The event I’m most excited about is TRANSFORM 2021 (mark your calendar: 17 to 23 April!), the annual virtual meeting of the Software Underground. The society incorporated back in April, so it’s now officially a technical society. But it’s unlike most other technical societies in our domain: it’s free, and — so far anyway — it operates exclusively online. Like this year, the conference will focus on helping our community acquire new skills and connections for the future. Want to be part of it? Get notified.

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Thank you for reading our blog, following Agile, and being part of the digital subsurface community. If you’re experiencing uncertainty in your career, or in your personal life, I hope you’re able to take some time out to recharge over the next couple of weeks. We can take on 2021 together, and meet it head on — not with a plan, but with a purpose.

A big new almost-open dataset: Groningen

Open data enthusiasts rejoice! There’s a large new openly licensed subsurface dataset. And it’s almost awesome.

The dataset has been released by Dutch oil and gas operator Nederlandse Aardolie Maatschappij (NAM), which is a 50–50 joint venture between Shell and ExxonMobil. They have operated the giant Groningen gas field since 1963, producing from the Permian Rotliegend Group, a 50 to 225 metre-thick sandstone with excellent reservoir properties. The dataset consists of a static geological model and its various components: data from over [edit: 6000 well logs], a prestack-depth migrated seismic volume, plus seismic horizons, and a large number of interpreted faults. It’s 4.4GB in total — not ginormous.

Induced seismicity

There’s a great deal of public interest in the geology of the area: Groningen has been plagued by induced seismicity for over 30 years. The cause has been identified as subsidence resulting from production, and became enough of a concern that the government took steps to limit production in 2014, and has imposed a plan to shut down the field completely by 2030. There are also pressure maintenance measures in place, as well as a lot of monitoring. However, the earthquakes continue, and have been as large as magnitude 3.6 — a big worry for people living in the area. I assume this issue is one of the major reasons for NAM releasing the data.*

In the map of the Top Rotliegendes (right, from Kortekaas & Jaarsma 2017), the elevation varies from –2442 m (red) to –3926 m. Major faults are shown in blue, along with seismic events of local magnitude 1.3 to 3.6. The Groningen field outline is shown in red.

Can you use the data? Er, maybe.

Anyone can access the data. NAM and Utrecht University, who have published the data, have selected a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence, which is (in my opinion) the best licence to use. And unlike certain other data owners (see below!) they have resisted the temptation to modify the licence and confuse everyone. (It seems like they were tempted though, as the metadata contains the plea, “If you intend on using the model, please let us know […]”, but it’s not a requirement.)

However, the dataset does not meet the Open Definition (see section 1.4). As the owners themselves point out, there’s a rather major flaw in their dataset:

This model can only be used in combination with Petrel software • The model has taken years of expert development. Please use only if you are a skilled Petrel user.

I’ll assume this is a statement of fact, as opposed to a formal licence restriction. It’s clear that requiring (de facto or otherwise) the use of proprietary software (let alone software costing more than USD 100,000!) is not ‘open’ at all. No normal person has access to Petrel, and the annoying thing is that there’s absolutely no reason to make the dataset this inconvenient to use. The obvious format for seismic data is SEG-Y (although there is a ZGY reader out now), and there’s LAS 2 or even DLIS for wireline logs. There are no open standard formats for seismic horizons or formation tops, but some sort of text file would be fine. All of these formats have open source file readers, or can be parsed as text. Admittedly the geomodel is a tricky one; I don’t know about any open formats. [UPDATE: see the note below from EPOS-NL.]

Happily, even if the data owners do nothing, I think this problem will be remedied by the community. Some kind soul with access to Petrel will export the data into open formats, and then this dataset really will be a remarkable addition to the open subsurface data family. Stay tuned for more on this.

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References

NAM (2020). Petrel geological model of the Groningen gas field, the Netherlands. Open access through EPOS-NL. Yoda data publication platform Utrecht University. DOI 10.24416/UU01-1QH0MW.

M Kortekaas & B Jaarsma (2017). Improved definition of faults in the Groningen field using seismic attributes. Netherlands Journal of Geosciences — Geologie en Mijnbouw 96 (5), p 71–85, 2017 DOI 10.1017/njg.2017.24.

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UPDATE on 7 December 2020

* According to Henk Kombrink’s sources, the dataset release is “an initiative from NAM itself, driven primarily by a need from the research community for a model of the field.” Check out Henk’s article about the dataset:

Kombrink, H (2020). Static model giant Groningen field publicly available. Article in Expro News. https://expronews.com/technology/static-model-giant-groningen-field-publicly-available/

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UPDATE 10 December 2020

I got the following information from EPOS-NL:

“EPOS-NL and NAM are happy to see the enthusiasm for this most recent data publication. Petrel is one of the most commonly used software among geologists in both academia and industry, and so provides a useful platform for many users worldwide. For those without a Petrel license, the data publication includes a RESCUE 3d grid data export of the model. RESCUE data can be read by a number of open source software. This information was not yet very clearly provided in the data description, so thanks for pointing this out. Finally, the well log data and seismic data used in the Petrel model are also openly accessible, without having to use Petrel software, on the NLOG website (https://www.nlog.nl/en/data), i.e. the Dutch oil and gas portal. Hope this helps!”

The evolution of the Software Underground

The Software Underground started as a mailing list in 2014 with maybe twenty participants, in the wake of the first geoscience hackathons. There are now more than 2,160 “rocks + computers” enthusiasts in the Underground, with about 20 currently joining every week. It’s the fastest growing digital subsurface water-cooler in the world! And the only one.

The beating heart of the Software Underground is its free, open Slack chat room. Accessible to anyone, it brings this amazing community right to your mobile device or computer desktop. When it comes to the digital subsurface, it has a far higher signal:noise ratio than LinkedIn, Twitter, or Facebook. Here are some of the topics under discussion this week:

• The role of coding challenges in job interviews.

• Handling null values in 2D grids such as airborne gamma-ray.

• How to load an open seismic dataset into OpendTect.

• A new series of tutorials for the GeoStats.jl Julia package.

• Plenty of discussion about how to interpret negative oil prices!

But the Software Underground — or Swung as its population affectionately call it — is more than just a chatroom. It organizes events. It compiles awesome documents. And it has great ambitions.

Evolution

To better explore those ambitions, the Underground is evolving.

Until now, it’s had a slightly murky existence, or non-existence, operating in mysterious ways and without visible means of support. When we tried to get a ‘non-profit’ booth at a conference last year, we couldn’t because the Software Underground isn’t just a non-profit, it’s a non-entity. It doesn’t legally exist.

Most of the time, this nonexistence is a luxury. No committees! No accounts! No lawyers!

But sometimes it’s a problem. Like when you want to accept donations in a transparent way. Or take sponsorship from a corporation. Or pay for an event venue. Or have some accountability for what goes on in the community. Or make a decision without waiting for Matt to read his email. Sometimes it matters.

A small band of supporters and evangelists have decided the time has come for the Software Underground to stand up and be counted! We’re going legal. We’re going to exist.

What will change?

As little as possible! And everything!

The Slack will remain the same. Free for everyone. The digital subsurface water-cooler (or public house, if you prefer).

We’re taking on our biggest event yet in June — a fully online conference called TRANSFORM 2020. Check it out.

Soon we will exist legally, as we move to incorporate in Canada as a non-profit. Later, we can think about how membership and administration will work. For now, there will be some ‘interim’ directors, whose sole job is to establish the terms of the organization’s existence and get it to its first Annual General Meeting, sometime in 2021.

The goal is to make new things possible, with a new kind of society.

And you’re invited.