Finding Data Should be Easier than Finding Oil

The competitiveness of modern enterprises heavily depends on their ability to make the right business decisions by relying on efficient and timely analysis of the right business critical data. In large and data intensive companies such as Equinor, a Norwegian multinational oil and gas company with more than 20,000 employees, gathering such data is not a trivial task due to the growing size and complexity of corporate information sources. As a result, the data gathering task is often the most time-consuming part of the decision making process, in particular when it comes to the work processes of Equinor's exploration geologists that should find in a timely manner new exploitable accumulations of oil or gas in given areas by analysing data about these areas. In this work we present our experience in addressing this data challenge tast at Equinor. We have developed and deployed at Equinor a semantic data access system that relies on the Ontology Based Data Access (OBDA) approach. Our system is based on our solid theoretical contributions and has been extensively evaluated at Equinor

Ontology Based Data Access in Statoil

Ontology Based Data Access (OBDA) is a prominent approach to query databases which uses an ontology to expose data in a conceptually clear manner by abstracting away from the technical schema-level details of the underlying data. The ontology is ‘connected’ to the data via mappings that allow to automatically translate queries posed over the ontology into data-level queries that can be executed by the underlying database management system. Despite a lot of attention from the research community, there are still few instances of real world industrial use of OBDA systems. In this work we present data access challenges in the data-intensive petroleum company Statoil and our experience in addressing these challenges with OBDA technology. In particular, we have developed a deployment module to create ontologies and mappings from relational databases in a semi-automatic fashion; a query processing module to perform and optimise the process of translating ontological queries into data queries and their execution over either a single DB of federated DBs; and a query formulation module to support query construction for engineers with a limited IT background. Our modules have been integrated in one OBDA system, deployed at Statoil, integrated with Statoil’s infrastructure, and evaluated with Statoil’s engineers and data

Fibroblasts Express Immune Relevant Genes and Are Important Sentinel Cells during Tissue Damage in Rainbow Trout (Oncorhynchus mykiss)

Fibroblasts have shown to be an immune competent cell type in mammals. However, little is known about the immunological functions of this cell-type in lower vertebrates. A rainbow trout hypodermal fibroblast cell-line (RTHDF) was shown to be responsive to PAMPs and DAMPs after stimulation with LPS from E. coli, supernatant and debris from sonicated RTHDF cells. LPS was overall the strongest inducer of IL-1β, IL-8, IL-10, TLR-3 and TLR-9. IL-1β and IL-8 were already highly up regulated after 1 hour of LPS stimulation. Supernatant stimuli significantly increased the expression of IL-1β, TLR-3 and TLR-9, whereas the debris stimuli only increased expression of IL-1β. Consequently, an in vivo experiment was further set up. By mechanically damaging the muscle tissue of rainbow trout, it was shown that fibroblasts in the muscle tissue of rainbow trout contribute to electing a highly local inflammatory response following tissue injury. The damaged muscle tissue showed a strong increase in the expression of the immune genes IL-1β, IL-8 and TGF-β already 4 hours post injury at the site of injury while the expression in non-damaged muscle tissue was not influenced. A weaker, but significant response was also seen for TLR-9 and TLR-22. Rainbow trout fibroblasts were found to be highly immune competent with a significant ability to express cytokines and immune receptors. Thus fish fibroblasts are believed to contribute significantly to local inflammatory reactions in concert with the traditional immune cells

Capillary pressure correlation for mixed-wet reservoirs

Summary For water-wet reservoirs, several expressions may be used to correlate capillary pressure, or height above the free water level, with the water saturation. These correlations all feature a vertical asymptote at the residual water saturation where the capillary pressure goes to plus infinity. We have developed a general capillary pressure correlation that covers primary drainage, imbibition, secondary drainage, and hysteresis scanning loops. The graph exhibits an asymptote at the residual saturation of water and of oil where the capillary pressure goes to plus and minus infinity, respectively. The shape of the correlation is simple yet flexible as a sum of two terms, each with two adjustable parameters and is verified by laboratory experiments and well-log data. An associated hysteresis scheme is also verified by experimental data. The correlation can be used to make representative capillary pressure curves for numerical simulation of reservoirs with varying wettability and to model and interpret flooding processes