Pragmatic Information Management For Environmental Monitoring In Oil And Gas

The oil and gas industry has an installed base that is characterized by local fragmented approaches for data management. Inside this information infrastructure, real-time monitoring of the subsea environment remains an unexplored arena that demands a cross-disciplinary and cross-organizational data integration layer. Semantic technologies have been proposed in the literature as a possible standardization solution. Their development depends on collaborative processes involving business partners from different industrial domains, thus requiring that an equifinal level of understanding is reached and boundaries of knowledge sharing are overcome. We describe an ethnographic study from an inter-organizational project in an oil and gas company, where the objective is to develop an integrated solution for real-time subsea environmental monitoring. We identify the challenges that emerge when sharing knowledge at a boundary on a syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic level. (i) The different backgrounds of the organizations involved and (ii) the unresolved issues affecting semantic-based solutions influence the possibility of reaching a shared understanding at a syntactic and semantic level. We open the black box of semantic technologies thanks to an information infrastructure perspective and conclude that collaboration can be carried out on a pragmatic level by addressing the implications of the specific technology