We are requesting $50,000 from the SEG Foundation to support development of COMMON GROUND, a free, WWW-accessible database/archive of petrophysical measurements. The money would be used to:
All data would be donated free of charge. (ARCO and Western Atlas are willing to donate data from their databases depending on the final conditions of the project. These initial data will form a substantial test set to motivate other organizations to join and donate to COMMON GROUND.) Data would include measurements already in machine readable form as well as paper copies of measurements and other uninterpreted data that could be scanned and preserved. All data would be provided at no cost (although subject to copyright on published material) and could be incorporated into local databases. All machine readable data would be stored in text files with scanned images stored using standard image storage formats.
The organization and management of the project would be on a strictly voluntary basis with Scales and Batzle acting as coordinators along with volunteers from the oil/gas industry, academic institutions such as Stanford, The Houston Advanced Research Center and the University of Oklahoma, Harvard, MIT, as well as others with expertise in geophysical/geological data management. We anticipate an initial development phase lasting two years. The first 6-12 months would be devoted to establishing a trial database. Donated data already machine readable would be first to be incorporated into the archive. Our plan is to have the trial database on-line for public access at the end of this period. During the second year we would begin scanning data not already machine readable. At the end of the second year we plan to offer CD-ROMs of the archive for a nominal copying fee.
On the COMMON GROUND WWW site we will maintain a list of references that we plan to use and encourage people to add new ones and to send us copies of gray publications that we would otherwise miss.