Big Data Guided Resources Businesses – Leveraging Location Analytics and Managing Geospatial-temporal Knowledge

Location data rapidly grow with fast-changing logistics and business rules. Due to fast-growing business ventures and their diverse operations locally and globally, location-based information systems are in demand in resource industries. Data sources in these industries are spatial-temporal, with petabytes in size. Managing volumes and various data in periodic and geographic dimensions using the existing modelling methods is challenging. The current relational database models have implementation challenges, including the interpretation of data views. Multidimensional models are articulated to integrate resource databases with spatial-temporal attribute dimensions. Location and periodic attribute dimensions are incorporated into various schemas to minimise ambiguity during database operations, ensuring resource data's uniqueness and monotonic characteristics. We develop an integrated framework compatible with the multidimensional repository and implement its metadata in resource industries. The resources’ metadata with spatial-temporal attributes enables business research analysts a scope for data views’ interpretation in new geospatial knowledge domains for financial decision support

Big Data guided Digital Petroleum Ecosystems for Visual Analytics and Knowledge Management

The North West Shelf (NWS) interpreted as a Total Petroleum System (TPS), is Super Westralian Basin with active onshore and offshore basins through which shelf, - slope and deep-oceanic geological events are construed. In addition to their data associativity, TPS emerges with geographic connectivity through phenomena of digital petroleum ecosystem. The super basin has a multitude of sub-basins, each basin is associated with several petroleum systems and each system comprised of multiple oil and gas fields with either known or unknown areal extents. Such hierarchical ontologies make connections between attribute relationships of diverse petroleum systems. Besides, NWS has a scope of storing volumes of instances in a data-warehousing environment to analyse and motivate to create new business opportunities. Furthermore, the big exploration data, characterized as heterogeneous and multidimensional, can complicate the data integration process, precluding interpretation of data views, drawn from TPS metadata in new knowledge domains. The research objective is to develop an integrated framework that can unify the exploration and other interrelated multidisciplinary data into a holistic TPS metadata for visualization and valued interpretation. Petroleum digital ecosystem is prototyped as a digital oil field solution, with multitude of big data tools. Big data associated with elements and processes of petroleum systems are examined using prototype solutions. With conceptual framework of Digital Petroleum Ecosystems and Technologies (DPEST), we manage the interconnectivity between diverse petroleum systems and their linked basins. The ontology-based data warehousing and mining articulations ascertain the collaboration through data artefacts, the coexistence between different petroleum systems and their linked oil and gas fields that benefit the explorers. The connectivity between systems further facilitates us with presentable exploration data views, improvising visualization and interpretation. The metadata with meta-knowledge in diverse knowledge domains of digital petroleum ecosystems ensures the quality of untapped reservoirs and their associativity between Westralian basins

Data geo-Science Approach for Modelling Unconventional Petroleum Ecosystems and their Visual Analytics

Storage, integration and interoperability are critical challenges in the unconventional exploration data management. With a quest to explore unconventional hydrocarbons, in particular, shale gas from fractured shales, we aim at investigating new petroleum data geoscience approaches. The data geo-science describes the integration of geoscience-domain expertise, collaborating mathematical concepts, computing algorithms, machine learning tools, including data and business analytics. Further, to strengthen data-science services among producing companies, we propose an integrated multidimensional repository system, for which factual instances are acquired on gas shales, to store, process and deliver fractured-data views in new knowledge domains. Data dimensions are categorized to examine their suitability in the integrated prototype articulations that use fracture-networks and attribute dimension model descriptions. The factual instances are typically from seismic attributes, seismically interpreted geological structures and reservoirs, well log, including production data entities. For designing and developing multidimensional repository systems, we create various artefacts, describing conceptual, logical and physical models. For exploring the connectivity between seismic and geology entities, multidimensional ontology models are construed using fracture network attribute dimensions and their instances. Different data warehousing and mining are added support to the management of ontologies that can bring the data instances of fractured shales, to unify and explore the associativity between high-dense fractured shales and their orientations. The models depicting collaboration of geology, geophysics, reservoir engineering and geo-mechanics entities and their dimensions can substantially reduce the risk and uncertainty involved in modelling and interpreting shale- and tight-gas reservoirs, including traps associated with Coal Bed Methane (CBM). Anisotropy, Poisson's ratio and Young's modulus properties corroborate the interpretation of stress images from the 3D acoustic characterization of shale reservoirs. The statistical analysis of data-views, their correlations and patterns further facilitate us to visualize and interpret geoscientific metadata meticulously. Data geo-science guided integrated methodology can be applied in any basin, including frontier basins

Analysis of Electromagnetic Depth Sounding Responses Over a Layered Earth: Investigating Oil & Gas Seeps in the Petroleum Provinces

The present work embodies the results of theoretical and practical investigations of electromagnetic depth sounding using central frequency sounding (CFS) system over a layered earth. Failure of conventional electrical resistivity sounding in the study of geological conditions under resistive overburden calls for variable frequency sounding techniques. Electromagnetic depth sounding which involves the measurement of variation in conductivity with depth is used for solving various geoengineering, hydrogeological and shallow cases of oil & gas seeps associated with stratified earth. The CFS, which is one of the depth sounding techniques involving the measurement of vertical component of magnetic field induced at the centre of a circular or square loop, is considered in the present study for obtaining theoretical responses over a layered earth and its interpretation with shallow oil and gas seeps. Because of some limitations of contour integration and numerical integration approaches, used earlier, a more rapid digital linear filter technique is adopted for evaluation of the integral involved in the CFS theoretical expressions. Theoretical expressions for frequency-domain soundings written for layered earth models are suitably transformed for evaluation through digital linear filter. Dimensionless normalized vertical magnetic field is computed for different frequencies and loop radii for layered earth models with different layer conductivities and thicknesses. The responses computed for these cases are analysed in terms of resolution characteristics and detectability effects. In frequency-domain sounding, amplitude response curves of layer-sequences show the effect of layer conductivity, layer thickness and loop radius. Separation between individual curves on the sets for amplitude responses normally gives sufficient indications for subsurface conductivity variations of the layered earth cases. The author explores the CFS applicability and feasibility in investigating shallow oil & gas seeps in oil & gas provinces, in particular on the flanks of the rifted grabens and basin margin areas, where sediment – basement contact areas are interpreted

Are Geological and Geophysical Data of the Albertine Graben, Big Data? Are they Big in an Integrated Upstream Project?

In spite of high pace of exploration activity in the Lake Albert basin, appraisal and field development become challenging in the Albertine Graben of Western Uganda. The volumes and variety of exploration data sources in these basins exist in different scales, sizes and formats in multiple dimensions (including periodic and geographic dimensions) and domains. Modelling and integrating such unstructured data need a new direction, in particular, the data structuring, storage and retrieval. We propose Big Data tools since the data in terabyte scale in multiple domains are needed to bring them together in an upstream business.We aim at a holistic information system development, simulating Petroleum Digital Ecosystem (PDE) and Petroleum Management Information System (PMIS) articulations with data modelling, data warehousing and mining, visualization and interpretation artefacts. This approach facilitates the data management not only in the Albertine Graben but from basins of Sudan, Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda and Burundi in the western arm of the East African Rift System (EARS). We evaluate Big Data, exploring the connectivity among multiple oil and gas fields and their associated petroleum systems, providing new insights on data integration and management, adding values to data analytics and exploration projects in the Albertine Graben context

Multivariate analysis of heavy metals content of beef from Soroti, Uganda

Information about food hygiene and quality in the sub-Saharan African countries remains scarce at a time when many of their citizenry are beginning to acquire the much coveted middle income status. Confounding this are challenges linked to monitoring on a continuous basis the safety of food produced by such lucrative industries as the beef industry. The objective of the current study was to initiate a process of encouraging changes in the status quo, by showing how a first step in that direction might look like. Using heavy metal contents of representative beef samples from butcheries in Soroti, Uganda, typical of a sub-Saharan country, we demonstrate how relationships and common sources of metals in food could be identified in a multivariate space. Beef samples from 40 sites were analyzed by atomic absorption spectrometry for iron (Fe), zinc (Zn), nickel (Ni), chromium (Cr), lead (Pb), copper (Cu), cobalt (Co) and cadmium (Cd). The study showed that all beef samples contained these metals, the extent of which were in the order: Fe > Zn >> Ni, Cr > Pb > Cu, Co > Cd. By correlation analysis, the pairs Ni and Cr, Cd and Co, Ni and Fe or Cr and Fe were found to be most likely coming from similar sources. At least three distinct characteristics of beef consumed in Soroti were also found, a distinction perhaps arising from three major categories of feedlots used to raise donor cattle. The incremental risk of children or adults developing cancer over a lifetime was estimated and found to fall into three categories, two of which are separately explained by the presence of Cr or Ni. The sources of these metals remain a matter of speculation on our part. More studies are needed to determine these sources and to understand the nature of cancer risk in the three categories of beef identified here

“They forget what they came for”: Uganda's army in Sudan

Uganda's army, the Uganda People's Defence Force (UPDF), has been operating on Sudanese territory since the late 1990s. From 2002 to 2006, a bilateral agreement between the governments in Khartoum and Kampala gave the Ugandan soldiers permission to conduct military operations in Southern Sudan to eliminate the Ugandan rebel Lord's Resistance Army (LRA). Instead of conducting a successful operation against Uganda's most persistent rebels - who had withdrawn into Sudanese territory and acted as a proxy force in Sudan's civil war - the UPDF conducted a campaign of abuse against Sudanese civilians. Drawing on extensive fieldwork conducted over several years, this article documents local experiences of a foreign army's involvement in the brutal Sudanese civil war. It outlines why continued operations of the UPDF outside their borders recreate the same problem they purport to be fighting: abuses of civilians. Since 2008, US military support for the UPDF mission against the LRA has called into question the viability of continued militarisation through an army that has committed widely documented human rights abuses. The foreign military has not brought peace to the region. Instead, it has made a peaceful environment less likely for residents of South Sudan

A Genomic Regulatory Network for Development

Development of the body plan is controlled by large networks of regulatory genes. A gene regulatory network that controls the specification of endoderm and mesoderm in the sea urchin embryo is summarized here. The network was derived from large-scale perturbation analyses, in combination with computational methodologies, genomic data, cis-regulatory analysis, and molecular embryology. The network contains over 40 genes at present, and each node can be directly verified at the DNA sequence level by cis-regulatory analysis. Its architecture reveals specific and general aspects of development, such as how given cells generate their ordained fates in the embryo and why the process moves inexorably forward in developmental time

A Genomic Regulatory Network for Development

A Genomic Regulatory Network for Developmen

Descriptive Analysis of Heavy Metals Content of Beef From Eastern Uganda and Their Safety for Public Consumption

In this study, we initiated an effort to generate information about beef safety in Uganda. Our entry point was to assess by atomic absorption spectrophotometry the levels of essential elements copper (Cu), cobalt (Co), iron (Fe) and zinc (Zn), and non-essential elements lead (Pb), chromium (Cr), nickel (Ni), and cadmium (Cd) in 40 beef samples collected from within and around Soroti (Uganda). The information was used to evaluate the safety of consuming such beef against the World Health Organization (WHO) limits. The latter was accomplished by (i) estimating the daily intake (EDI) of each metal in the study area, (ii) modeling the non-cancer health risk using the target hazard quotient (THQ) and (iii) modeling the cancer risk using the incremental lifetime cancer risk (ILCR). The study finds that the mean concentrations (±95% CI) and EDI were in the order of Fe > Zn > Cr > Ni > Pb > Co > Cu > Cd. Cancer risk was found to be due to Ni > Cr > Cd > Pb and significantly higher in children than adults. The latter particularly demonstrates the importance of Ni poisoning in the study area. Overall, while essential elements in our beef samples were below WHO limits (hence no health risks), non-essential elements had high health and cancer risks due to higher levels of Cr and Ni