SPE-173398-MS

Digital Oilfield Standards Update

James L Hollingsworth, Energistics

Copyright 2015, Society of Petroleum Engineers

This paper was prepared for presentation at the SPE Digital Energy Conference and Exhibition held in The Woodlands, Texas, USA, 3–5 March 2015.

This paper was selected for presentation by an SPE program committee following review of information contained in an abstract submitted by the author(s). Contents
of the paper have not been reviewed by the Society of Petroleum Engineers and are subject to correction by the author(s). The material does not necessarily reflect
any position of the Society of Petroleum Engineers, its officers, or members. Electronic reproduction, distribution, or storage of any part of this paper without the written
consent of the Society of Petroleum Engineers is prohibited. Permission to reproduce in print is restricted to an abstract of not more than 300 words; illustrations may
not be copied. The abstract must contain conspicuous acknowledgment of SPE copyright.

Abstract
Oil and gas operations involve multiple equipment suppliers, service companies, contractors, and
operating partners, which makes the need for standardization in the digital oilfield clear. Successful
deployment of any digital oilfield solution involves transfer of information among these different players,
in addition to standardized equipment. The oil and gas standards community has been working to enable
end-to-end, real-time data transfer from the sensor to simulation or the accounting system or a regulator,
in addition to the traditional exchange of larger static information. The industry has seen a great deal of
progress on the uptake of data standards for data in motion and fundamental improvements in the
standards themselves. The data in motion are real-time data in the drilling and production arenas, and
on-demand movement of data between applications or among partners and regulators. The static data is
the traditional contextual information about wells and their histories along with information on their
historical performance and the activities used to create and operate them.
This paper provides an introduction to standards in general, an update on the current state of the art for
the dominant real-time and static data standards, the revised architecture currently being deployed for
those standards, and the relationships among the various standards-setting bodies in the industry.

Introduction
The need for industry-wide standardization in the digital oilfield is clear. With millions of producing
wells, thousands of small and large operators and national oil companies, thousands of equipment and
services suppliers, hundreds of software companies, and over two hundred regulatory authorities in the
world, custom standards between individual organizations for equipment sizes and interconnections—and
the data created by them—would be impossible. Larger companies and regulators may define standards
they require their suppliers and partners to follow, but even following only those standards would reduce
the list down to maybe a few hundred.
The industry has long recognized the need for widespread standards for use in connecting equipment
and for exchanging information among partners, between suppliers and operators, and for reporting to
regulators and the public. Organizations and technologies have sprung up in response to this need and
today numerous organizations provide useful standards specifically tailored to the needs of the oil and gas
industry. This paper is an update on the state of digital oilfield standards across various standards bodies
with an emphasis on technical data transfer.
2 SPE-173398-MS

Kinds of Standards
In general, there are many kinds of standards. This paper focuses on three kinds of standards: de facto,
de jure, and consensus.
De Facto Standards
The simplest category of standards is the de facto standard. “Standards that emerge purely through market
forces (maybe through the dominant position of one or a group of players) are called de facto standards”
(Jakobs 2000, p. 13). De facto is a Latin phrase meaning “concerning fact” and in law refers to something
that exists in fact but is not mandated by law. A de facto standard may be the result of purchasing
decisions or simply a widespread local custom that results in a product or practice (or data format)
overwhelming all others in actual practice.
There are many familiar de facto standards in everyday life including, for example, the placement of
the steering wheel on the left side of vehicles in the US. In the world of spreadsheets, VisiCalc was the
original de facto standard, supplanted by Lotus 123, and now by Excel. There are many famous and
well-studied examples of de facto standards driven by marketing. These examples include: the choice of
alternating current over direct current in households, VHS over Beta format for video recording tapes,
ballpoint over fountain pens, the QWERTY keyboard, and Blu-Ray over HD-DVD. None of these is
mandated by law.
De facto standards are sometimes controlled by a single commercial entity for their own benefit,
especially when that entity has market domination. Adobe’s PDF format, Oracle’s dialect of SQL and
Microsoft’s.xls format are good examples of de facto standards in the software world. These are sometime
termed industry or proprietary standards, depending on whether the company chooses to share the details
of the format or not (Jakobs 2000, p. 14).
In the oil and gas industry, the DLIS file format for wireline logs is an example of an industry standard
data format that is so widely supported it is a de facto standard.
It’s worth noting that standards can change from one type to another. Sometimes a de facto standard
or practice becomes codified in law and becomes a formal de jure standard, like the choice of AC versus
DC.
De Jure Standards
A standard or practice mandated by law or by contractual or other legal terms is a de jure standard. De
jure is a Latin phrase meaning “concerning law”. Originally this type of standard would have been created
by a government entity and its use was required. From medieval times to the present, standards have been
created for lengths and volume measures and other fundamental purposes. For example, the US gallon was
established at 231 cubic inches by law in 1836 (Chisholm 1965, p 46).
De jure standards change at the pace at which laws and regulations develop, which means they are
often very long lived. The kind of electrical outlet, the side of the road on which the population of a
country drives, the voltage of house current, the official language(s) of government, and many other
aspects of life are dictated by durable de jure standards.
The oil and gas industry has de jure standards for safety and process equipment, for testing and many
other aspects of upstream operations, but does not have many relevant to the digital oilfield or data
transfer. Most de jure standards for data exchange are for reporting to regulators. In some cases, standard
paper forms have been converted to electronic submittals, but few standard data formats are used by
multiple regulators.
In modern times, de jure standards are created in several ways, but direct government creation of
standards is less common. Since the late 19th century, many private standards development organizations
(SDOs) have been founded (Wang 2011, p. 9). Some organizations began as professional or scholarly
societies, like the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), founded in 1880; some as industry
trade associations, like the American Petroleum Institute (API), founded in 1919; while others were
SPE-173398-MS 3

formed specifically to create standards, like the American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM),
founded in 1898.
The standards created by these types of organization do not carry the weight of law because they are
not government bodies, even though some authors identify these organizations as de jure standards
creators (Jakobs 2000, p 13). Even though they are not government agencies there are two ways in which
these private SDOs have their standards incorporated in law.
First, a law or regulation can directly reference a standard. For example, US Federal regulation 46 CFR
53.01-3 (the regulation under which the US Coast Guard ensures that marine vessels are designed
adequately to protect safety) explicitly adopts part of the ASME Boiler Code.
The second way a private standard becomes a de jure standard is through a country’s national standards
agency. Every country in the world has a government agency responsible for maintaining the set of
standards used in commerce and by the government itself. These national standards organizations examine
available standards and choose which ones will be declared as national standards, which then carry the
weight of law within those countries (SES 2010). In the US, the National Institute of Standards and
Technology (NIST), an agency of the US Department of Commerce, creates and funds development of
standards, while the American National Standards Institute (ANSI), a private non-profit organization, is
responsible for promoting National Standards, certifying SDOs, and representing the US on international
standards bodies.
Whether they become du jure or not, these private standards are developed through a consensus
process, which is the third kind of standard.

Consensus Standards
A consensus standard is created when a formal agreement among a group of interested parties to follow
a common standard is agreed. “Consensus requires that all views and objections be considered, and that
an effort be made toward their resolution. Consensus implies more than the concept of a simple majority
but not necessarily unanimity” (Toth 1990). Familiar organizations like ISO, ANSI, ASTM, API,
Energistics, etc. are standards bodies that provide consensus standards. This kind of organization serves
as the host of the committees or special interest groups (SIG) or workgroups where agreement is made
among the participants; they then publish and maintain the results.
Consensus standards groups have three main processes: closed consensus, open source, and open
consensus.
Closed Consensus Standards Closed consensus groups are bodies where only the membership of the
organization is allowed to vote on or otherwise determine the content of a standard. The best example of
this is ISO, the International Organization for Standardization. ISO membership is limited to a single
representative from each member country (which is normally the national standards body) and only that
group can formally vote on standards.
Other organizations can serve as liaisons or otherwise participate in the technical committees, which
provide the content of the standards. For example, Energistics is a liaison to ISO Technical Committee
(TC) 184 and TC 211 (which are about industrial data and digital geographic information, respectively).
In the role of liaison, Energistics represent the interests of the oil and gas industry to those technical
committees and can provide input but cannot formally vote on draft standards.
Open Source Standards Open source standards are the extreme opposite. Often, no formal coordinating
organization exists and anyone who wants to participate can contribute content whenever they like. In
many open source efforts, an ad hoc leadership group emerges to roll back abusive or otherwise negative
submissions and to decide when to call a release “done,”, but this isn’t essential. Some open-source
efforts, like the Apache Software Foundation (www.apache.org) and the Free Software Foundation
4 SPE-173398-MS

(www.gnu.org), have permanent, funded organizations, but the code and contributions are freely avail-
able.
Open Consensus Standards The standards of most relevance to the oil and gas industry in general and
the digital oilfield in particular are called open consensus standards. An open consensus standard is under
the control of a permanent standards-development organization, which may or may not charge for the
distribution of its standards. Participation in the standards development is by both paid members and
non-members of the organization. The standards are developed by volunteers coordinated by the staff of
the standards body, which normally edit and distribute the results of the groups work—the standards and
related materials. The results of open consensus standards normally go through a period of open comment
from the extended community (members and non-members) before they are formally published. The
standards bodies most familiar to the digital oilfield community—Energistics, API, and others—work this
way.

Oil and Gas Standards Bodies

Many standards bodies are relevant to the oil and gas industry. Many of these bodies produce standards
that are used across multiple industries for equipment, process, or safety purposes. These include ASME,
ASTM, International Society of Automation (ISA), ISO, and many others. There are also many infor-
mation technology (IT)-related organizations, which define general-purpose IT standards used in the
digital oilfield. These include the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), Internet
Engineering Task Force (IETF), Object Management Group (OMG), and the World Wide Web Consor-
tium (W3C).
In addition to these cross-industry groups, there are groups dedicated to developing standards for the
oil and gas industry; these include the API and the International Association of Drilling Contractors
(IADC). ISO has at least one technical committee specific to upstream oil and gas, ISO TC67 for
materials, equipment and offshore structures for petroleum, petrochemical and natural gas industries.
Some of these groups may create standards that involve transfer of information relevant to the digital
oilfield. For example, ISO TC67 manages a standard for transferring equipment reliability data (ISO
14224:2006 Petroleum, petrochemical and natural gas industries -- Collection and exchange of reliability
and maintenance data for equipment).
A handful of standards bodies define standards relevant specifically to the digital oilfield, some specific
to oil and gas, others across industries. These organizations are coordinated under an umbrella group
called the Standards Leadership Council. The Standards Leadership Council is currently comprised of the
presidents of 11 bodies specific to the digital oilfield. Each of them is listed and described below. All
descriptions are from the respective organizations’ websites, which are listed below.
Energistics
Energistics is a global, not-for-profit, membership organization that serves as the facilitator, custodian,
and advocate for the development and adoption of technical open data-exchange standards in the upstream
oil and gas industry. Designed to unite upstream industry professionals in a neutral and collaborative
facilitation environment, Energistics membership consists of integrated, independent and national oil
companies; oilfield service companies; software vendors; system integrators; regulatory agencies; and the
global standards user community. (126 corporate members)
Contact: Jerry Hubbard - jerry.hubbard@energistics.org www.energistics.org
IOGP
International Association of Oil & Gas Producers is a unique global forum in which members identify and
share best practices to achieve improvements in every aspect of health, safety, the environment, security,
social responsibility, engineering, and operations. IOGP encompasses most of the world’s leading
SPE-173398-MS 5

publicly-traded, private, and state-owned oil and gas companies, industry associations, and major
upstream service companies. (83 corporate members)
Contact: Lucyna Kryla-Straszewska - Lucyna.Kryla-Straszewska@ogp.org.uk http://www.iogp.org
MIMOSA
MIMOSA, an operations and maintenance open systems alliance, is a not-for-profit trade association
dedicated to developing and encouraging the adoption of open information standards for operations and
maintenance in manufacturing, fleet, and facility environments. (16 corporate members)
Contact: Alan Johnston - ATJohn@mimosa.org www.mimosa.org
OGC
Open Geospatial Consortium is an international voluntary consensus standards organization of more than
470 companies, government agencies, and universities who develop publicly available interface, encod-
ing, and protocol standards for the integration and sharing of geospatial content and services in any GIS,
location services, remote sensing, portal, or other applications. (472 corporate members)
Contact: Carl Reed - creed@opengeospatial.org http://www.opengeospatial.org/
OMG
Object Management Group is an international, open membership, not-for-profit computer industry
standards consortium. Founded in 1989, OMG standards are driven by vendors, end-users, academic
institutions and government agencies. (310 corporate members)
Contact: Richard Soley - soley@omg.org http://www.omg.org/
OPC
OPC Foundation is dedicated to ensuring interoperability in automation by creating and maintaining open
specifications that standardize the communication of acquired process data, alarm and event records,
historical data, and batch data to multi-vendor enterprise systems and between production devices. (461
corporate members)
Contact: Tom Burke - Thomas.Burke@OPCFoundation.org http://www.opcfoundation.org/
PCA
POSC Caesar Association is a non-profit global-standardization member organization that promotes the
development of open specifications to be used as standards for enabling the interoperability of data,
software, and related matters. (36 corporate members)
Contact: Nils Sandsmark - nils.sandsmark@posccaesar.org https://www.posccaesar.org/
PIDX
PIDX International provides a global forum for delivering the process, information, and technology
standards that facilitates seamless, efficient electronic business within the oil and natural gas industry and
its trading community. (38 corporate members)
Contact: Fadi Kanafani - fkanafani@pidx.org http://www.pidx.org/
PODS
Pipeline Open Data Standard Association was created to develop and support open data storage and
interchange standards to meet the specific data management needs of pipeline companies. (164 corporate
members)
Contact: Kathy Mayo - kathy.mayo@pods.org http://www.pods.org/
PPDM
Professional Petroleum Data Management Association is a global not-for-profit organization within the
petroleum industry to promote professional petroleum data management through the development and
dissemination of best practices. (95 corporate members)
Contact: Trudy Curtis - curtist@ppdm.org http://www.ppdm.org/
6 SPE-173398-MS

SEG
Society of Exploration Geophysicists is a not-for-profit organization that promotes the science of applied
geophysics and the education of geophysicists. SEG, founded in 1930, fosters the expert and ethical
practice of geophysics in the exploration and development of natural resources, in characterizing the near
surface, and in mitigating earth hazards. (30,000⫹ individual members)
Contact: Jill Lewis - jill@troika-int.com http://www.seg.org/

Update on Digital Oilfield Technical Data Standards

The standards bodies in the above list that create oil-and-gas-specific technical data standards are IOGP,
PPDM, SEG, and Energistics. This is a brief update on standards from those bodies.
IOGP
IOGP maintains the geodetic transformation registry developed by the former group, EPSG. The EPSG
geodetic parameter dataset is updated periodically and is currently on version 8.5.4 (released in September
2014) as of this writing. In addition to the parameter dataset, OGP has also developed a set of GIS shapes,
which define the area of suitability for each of the projected and geodetic systems in the registry.
The IOGP Geomatics Committee has also recently released a GML version of its seafloor data model
standard called SeabedML, as well as updates to its suites of Guidance Notes, which help users correctly
use coordinate transformations. GML is the Geography Markup Language produced by OGC.
IOGP also maintains the suite of seismic positioning standards formerly developed by the SEG. These
so-called “P-standards” are in wide use in describing the placement of hydrophones and other seismic-
related data transfers. Each of the P standards is in continuous review. As of this writing, the subcom-
mittee stewarding the P7 standard—the data exchange format for well deviation data—is in the process
of updating that standard.
IOGP also create standards used in safety and operational processes as well as hosting much of the
work of ISO TC67.
PPDM
The major standard produced by the PPDM Association is the PPDM data model. The latest version of
the model—version 3.9 —was released in May 2014 and adds a new geochemistry module and has many
other improvements.
In addition to the data model, the PPDM Association also has the “What Is A Well” standard, which
describes a normalized well-related terminology and a mapping to the sets of terms used by various
regulators around the world, the API D12 Standard (the API well numbering scheme), and a new set of
standardized business rules, which are especially valuable for calculating a quantitative score for data
quality.
SEG
SEG has developed and maintains the standards used in exchange of seismic acquisition and post-stack
datasets. The modern standard for acquisition datasets, SEG-D, was updated to rev 3.0 in 2012, which
clarified some aspects that were open to potential multiple interpretations and fixed some spelling errors
and other bugs in the standard document. The final update to SEG-D 3.0 rev 3.0 will be available soon.
In addition, a new version called SEG-D rev 3.1 is under development and will also be released soon. It
addresses problems with endianness and brings SEG-D in line with the latest coordinate system and
positioning standards from IOGP.
The flagship standard for post-stack data, the SEG-Y standard, is undergoing a major revision as of this
writing; SEG-Y rev 2 will be available soon.
Energistics
The Energistics suite of standards is for the transfer of real-time streaming and of static upstream technical
data in areas not covered by OGP or SEG (i.e., not geospatial or seismic data). This includes exchange
SPE-173398-MS 7

of data from or related to: well and downhole (including drilling real-time data), surface facilities and
production volumes, geological features and earth model, fracturing and other stimulation operations
including microseismic, a standard suite of units of measure, a standard defining the set of channel and
parameter names used by service companies in wireline, MWD and other well logging operations, and an
ISO-derived standard for “metadata,” which is used to describe and catalog any kind of exploration and
production (E&P) dataset. Energistics standards support the flow of data from the sensor to simulation and
reporting, except for seismic trace data, which is handled by SEG.
A description of these standards and their current status follows:
RESQML RESQML is a standard used to transfer data among earth modeling and reservoir simulation
software. The name comes from its birth as the XML version of an older standard called RESCUE,
although the standard has moved far beyond the original capabilities.
The next generation of the standard, RESQML2 v2.0, was published in September 2014. RESQML2
recognizes that there are real-life features in the earth, like faults and geologic layers, which we can never
know perfectly, specific interpretations of these features, and computer science representations (like grids
or fault sticks), which are used to persist those interpretations. In addition, properties (like porosity or
permeability or water saturation, etc.) which have been assigned to those representations to build up an
earth model for simulation, geostatistical analysis, etc. can be transferred as part of the model. Transfers
may include complete models (all model component and the relationships between them) or partial models
of only the data that has changed.
WITSML WITSML is used in a large percentage of all the wells drilled in the world to move data from
the rigsite to the office. In addition, WITSML is also widely used to simply move well-related data from
one data environment to another. The most widely-used version of WITSML is 1.3.1, but the newer
version 1.4.1.1 has been in existence for more than a year and adoption is accelerating. Several vendors
now have WITSML servers that have been certified on 1.4.1.1, so the rate of use of that latest version is
climbing.
Current implementations of WITSML move data in near-realtime, meaning the data is stored in a
WITSML server and the client has to ask the server repeatedly (poll) for the latest data points. The new
generation, called WITSML2, will be capable of true real-time streaming data movement via updated
technology. This was delivered in September 2014 as a Community Technology Preview (CTP) to be
followed by a formal release early in 2015.
PRODML PRODML is the standard used to transfer production volumes, well tests, definition of a flow
network, distributed temperature sensing, and other data from ongoing production operations. PRODML
also contains a new completion transfer standard, which can describe the full inventory of the equipment
installed downhole and all the actions ever done on the well.
PRODML is actively working on several fronts. An update to the distributed temperature sensing
transfer has just been released in July 2014. A new exchange type is being developed for making a
standard transfer of PVT data from the service companies who do the measurements to the operators and
among partners. A new standard to cover transfer of routine production data among joint interest partners
is also being developed.
EIP The Energy Industry Profile is the formal description of a set of attributes any dataset (or single
piece of data, for that matter) might have, such as title, originator, create date, coordinate reference system,
etc. These attributes are called metadata, because they are data about data—it isn’t the well header record,
it’s information about the creating of the well header record.
The EIP is derived from a much larger ISO standard, ISO 19115. ISO 19115 has many parts and is
fairly complex, so a group of interested members have created a formal subset (or profile) of the standard
that is specifically useful to the upstream oil and gas industry. This profile was published in May2014.
8 SPE-173398-MS

Common Technical Architecture

The standards bodies working in the digital oilfield have historically used XML to define data transfers.
XML is a very common self-describing ASCII format. It has the benefits of being human-readable,
machine-readable, self-documenting, object-oriented, and possessing wide support among developer tools
and IT staff. XML is itself a consensus standard supported by the W3C.
To some extent, XML has been used whether it was the appropriate technology standard or not to
maintain consistency and protect existing commercial codebases. In some situations, a different technol-
ogy might have been more appropriate without those limitations.
In the recent past, the industry has evolved beyond simple XML to include other technologies more
appropriate to particular scenarios. The state of these technologies and their use in digital oilfield
standards follows.
XML (eXtensible Markup Language) is the familiar technology used in many existing standards suites.
Energistics currently uses XML v1.0 but is updating to v1.1 to give additional flexibility in non-ASCII
character sets.
JSON (Javascript Object Notation) is a newer technology for describing data structures that is less
verbose than XML. It is used by Energistics to describe the structure of real-time data streams and is a
candidate for later use in other types of transfers.
UML (Universal Modeling Language) is used among many standards bodies—including Energistics,
MIMOSA and OGC (plus the OMG, who created the standard) —to collaborate around a graphical
depiction of a process or data-exchange data model. Pictures with boxes and arrows are much easier for
subject matter experts to understand and comment on during the standards development process. XML
and other transfer technologies are generated directly from the UML pictures, which boosts productivity
and quality (by avoiding transcription mistakes).
HDF5 (Hierarchical Data Format v5) is a standard widely used in the scientific community for the
transfer of large volumes of floating-point data. One of the downsides of ASCII transfers (including XML
and JSON) is that an ASCII file can be many times larger than a simpler binary format and because of
the extra bytes associated with the self-documenting features of JSON and XML. HDF5 is close to as
small as a dataset can be, at the expense of easy human readability. But for moving seismic volumes or
grids or other large datasets, this tradeoff is deemed to be worthwhile.
OPC (Open Packaging Convention) is used to organize and reduce the file sizes of ASCII files
involved in a transfer. A RESQML earth model data transfer can involve hundreds of thousands of small
XML documents. It is obviously helpful if these files are organized in a folder structure and zipped to
reduce the sizes of the files. There is an existing standard which does just that: the Open Packaging
Conventions developed by Microsoft for the files used by its Office suite (the familiar pptx, docx, xlsx,
etc. files). At the request of the EU, this file format was adopted as an Ecma and ISO standard and is
supported directly in Visual Studio and other development toolsets.
EPC (Energistics Packaging Conventions, a profile of OPC) is an Energistics add-on to OPC, which
adds E&P-specific file types and relationship types to the base OPC specification.
WebSocket is a standard related to html5, which is used to stream data over the internet as fast as TCP
can carry it. In a normal internet browser session, the user types a URL into the browser, which identifies
a Web server the user wants to connect to (e,g., http://www.amazon.com/) and the resource the user would
like the Web server to send it (e.g., the page called index.html). This process of call and response is
repeated over and over as a user chooses further links on the Web page.
With WebSocket, the user connects to a Web server and gives the Web server the identifier for a port
on the user’s machine and tells the Web server to begin streaming data through that port as fast as it can.
Data is streamed until the connection is broken or at the termination request of either party.
SPE-173398-MS 9

The Web Socket protocol is used in the next generation of Energistics standards to support true
real-time streaming of data from a server to a client, whether the server is a drilling rig, a producing well,
or a database serving data to a series of clients.
Avro
When communicating in a spoken language, sentences are recited one word at a time because we cannot
speak multiple words simultaneously. Serial data protocols like WebSocket have the same limitation. For
the data to be transmitted, they have to be broken up into bytes and each byte broken into bits and put on
the wire. There also has to be a mirror-image set of processes that reassemble the data into meaningful
structures at the receiving end. This process is broadly called serialization.
Avro is a data serializer developed and maintained by the Apache open source community. Avro has
the interesting feature that the structure of the data doesn’t have to be decided in advance—it simply
informs the listening client of the structure of the data it is about to receive. This capability gives the
digital oilfield the flexibility it needs to be able to dynamically make changes at a rigsite or producing
well.
ETP (Energistics Transfer Protocol) is the name given to a new standard protocol that uses Web-
Socket, Avro and JSON to transfer real-time and static data from a server to a client. The protocol is a
simple API consisting of messages passed between the client and server to initiate and close sessions,
identify the data available on a server, initiate transfer of some subset of that data, and other functions.
ETP will eventually replace the existing APIs in all Energistics standards.
Conclusion
Although 10-15 different standards groups work specifically with upstream digital oilfield data, the world
of E&P standards is not really so very complicated. Some groups work with business data, some with
technical data. Some are IT focused or pipeline focused or focused on a particular part of the well
lifecycle, while others are more general. There are four groups specifically working in the area of digital
oilfield technical data transfer and they do not overlap with each other to any great degree. Recent efforts,
such as the Standards Leadership Council, will ensure that existing standards group coordinate efforts and
avoid redundancy, which should make it easier for the industry to implement standards.

References
Chisholm, L. J., editor. 1965. Report of the 50th National Conference on Weights and Measures.
United States: National Bureau of Standards. http://books.google.com/books?id⫽OjB2dhETxxkC&
printsec⫽frontcover#v⫽onepage&q&f⫽false.
Greenstein, S. and Stango, V., editors. 2007. Standards and Public Policy. New York: Cambridge
University Press.
Jakobs, K. 2000. Standardisation Processes in IT: Impact, Problems and Benefits of User Participa-
tion. Braunschweig/Wiesaden: Friedr Vieweg & Sohn Verlagsgesellschaft mbH.
Standards Engineering Society (SES). 2010. Frequently Asked Questions. http://www.ses-standard-
s.org/?58 (accessed November 2014).
Toth, R.B. editor. 1990. Standards Management: A Handbook for Profit. ANSI
Wang, P. 2011. A Brief History of Standards and Standardization Organizations: A Chinese Per-
spective. Honolulu: East–West Center. http://www.eastwestcenter.org/fileadmin/stored/pdfs/
econwp117.pdf.