Applying Semantic Web Techniques to Reservoir Engineering: Challenges and Experiences from Event Modeling

In reservoir engineering domain experts deal with many tasks and operations, ranging from reservoir simulation to well maintenance scheduling, with the goal of maximizing oil production. These operations involve different applications, and generate a large number of events at the time of their execution. Understanding these events and the relationships among them can aid the domain experts in decision making. The task of aggregating and analyzing the event information that is generated by different applications can be difficult and time consuming. In this paper, we discuss our approach on modeling events in reservoir engineering using Semantic Web techniques. We create an extensible event ontology using the Web Ontology Language (OWL) to model events in reservoir engineering. Event relationships are encoded using the Semantic Web Rule Language (SWRL). The work presented in this paper is an initial step towards a vision of integrated field event management, that uses semantic web technologies to create an efficient platform for event analysis.