Invited Speakers

Modelling geological knowledge for petroleum exploration: Why should we bother about good models?

Speaker

• Mara Abel

Abstract

Before designing a software application, a conceptual model is defined in order to simplify the geological reality and to help to understand it. This model preserves the intention of the geologist in designing the application. However, such models do not represent the reality itself, but the conceptualization of the geologist about reality when building the application. In order to guarantee that software can be further integrated, this conceptualization needs to be shared by the community of earth scientists. This will assure that the geological concepts embedded in the software correspond to the same view of geological reality. Ontologies are being developed and used for explicating the semantics of the reservoir models and for integrating the data generated in the various stages of the exploration chain. We demonstrate how methodologies based on foundational ontologies can help in taking ontological decisions for modeling and application integration in petroleum exploration. These methodologies help in validating taxonomies by exposing inappropriate and inconsistent modeling choices and lead the modeler to define more precisely the geological objects in the model. We also present some knowledge-based applications developed according through these notions.

Short bio

Mara Abel has graduated in Geology and received a Masters and a Doctorate degree in Computer Science at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), Brazil. She is an Associate Professor at Informatics Institute of UFRGS, innovation researcher of CNPq (Level 1) and the leader of the branch “Intelligent Database” in the group that applies Knowledge Engineering and ontologies to improve the semantic of database models, especially those applied to petroleum exploration data. She has produced remarkable petroleum industrial research, such as the Petroledge® system, an intelligent database for petroleum reservoir description and interpretation, and Strataledge® , an ontology-based system for rock core description, commercialized by the ENDEEPER Company, a spin-off of her research group. She has managed 10 research or technology innovation projects with public or private funding from national and international institutions and she has published more than 50 conference papers, journals and book chapters in knowledge engineering.