O3PO: A domain ontology for offshore petroleum production plants

Abstract

The challenge of integrating data from many data sources has persisted as an issue in several industry areas. With the evolution of technology in the upstream petroleum sector (i.e., exploration and production), the petroleum business must contend with technological silos from diverse service providers and suffers from the associated waste of time to locate data and information throughout siloed databases. Based on a thorough compilation of industry-oriented requirements in the form of use cases and competency questions, this document defines a domain ontology for defining entities in offshore petroleum production plants. The objective is to develop a uniform and clearly defined reference vocabulary to aid engineers and information technology professionals in labeling and relating production plant monitoring, simulation measures, and facilities. BFO is the top-level ontology, while GeoCore and a continuing version of the core ontology developed by the Industry Ontology Foundry (IOF) configure the middle-level ontologies. We have studied and combined several other resources to build the ontology, such as glossaries from the industry and related ontologies. The research resulted in a well-founded domain ontology that provides universals, defined classes, and relations that can be useful in several types of applications in the domain. We have demonstrated the utility of the ontology within an actual scenario in an offshore petroleum field in Brazil, where we conceived and applied the domain ontology. This study is a component of the PeTWIN project,2 which looks at the best approaches for creating digital twins of offshore petroleum plants.