Tuesday, 5/22/2007
11:45 AM - 12:45 PM
Level: Case Study

The energy industry uses a variety of open and proprietary relational standards for oil and gas data. Many of these standards overlap, use similar but semantically distinct terminology, and in general divide the world of information in completely different ways, with lines drawn significantly between US, Canadian and international data. As IHS advances our goals of delivering a broader base of content to an increasingly global audience with ever-advancing technology, these semantic distinctions must be resolved. In this case study we report on our progress in defining and developing an ontology for energy industry data using Protégé; the challenges faced in both creating a “well”-designed model while supporting legacy database schemas, applications, and customers; and the near and long-term advantages of adopting semantic approaches to data organization. And we will answer the puzzling but painfully real question: how can there be 12,476 distinct and meaningful attributes for what amounts to a hole in the ground?

Dr. d'Armond Speers is the Director of Ontology and Semantics, in which role he is responsible for the architecture of data organization in IHS catalogs worldwide. Dr. Speers has over a decade of experience in linguistic technologies, taxonomies and semantics. He was previously CTO of Applied Linguistics, where he was responsible for the development of a semantic search engine. He was the founder and chief ontologist of Taxonomy Inc., designing and developing product classification systems. Prior to that he was the Director of Global Ontology for Requisite Technology, where he designed and managed a classification system covering 50 broad industry domains, with more than 11,000 categories in 16 different languages, and where he was awarded a patent on automatic classification techniques. He holds an MS in theoretical linguistics and a Ph.D. in computational linguistics, both from Georgetown University.