Internet Seismic Processing: A Paradigm Shift for Exploration (2001)

Abstract The Internet is rapidly becoming a commodity. It is simply a medium for delivering services, disseminating information, and doing business. The Internet by itself, or having an Internet strategy, is no longer a differentiating characteristic for a business enterprise. The April 2000 burst of the dot-com bubble underscored this fact. Nonetheless, the Internet is a new and disruptive technology that ushers in a paradigm shift for many industries, and seismic exploration is one of them. So while in the long run Internet technology will not differentiate an enterprise from it's competitors, it will become a key component of daily operations, and that component will have to be well implemented to leverage the power and competitive advantage inherent in the Internet. As in any paradigm shift, the disruptive technology will differentiate between those companies that will adapt and survive, and those that will not. Introduction There have been many significant paradigm shifts in geophysics, and we are in the middle of another one with the industry-wide impact of e-commerce. The adoption of rapidly evolving Internet/Intranet infrastructure and platform independent programming languages is allowing companies to take advantage of the flexibility and technology-leverage inherent in this new information paradigm. While the brave new world of the Internet and associated information technology explosion offer unprecedented opportunities, there are many implementation and data-security issues that warrant attention. The challenges are all surmountable by intelligent design that leverages existing technology. The upside for the geophysicist/user is a set of globally accessible processing and interpretation tools available on demand, as needed, without the burden of software upgrades, equipment purchases, and hardware administration. We describe a flexible client-server processing system that has been designed explicitly for Internet/Intranet use and has been tested and used on both. The server-side process controls compute-intensive applications such as depth migration while the client builds processing flows and allows interactive QC and model building. The power of the system lies in the extreme ease of integrating processing modules in the system, and in the platform independence of the client, which can be delivered to the user as a Java standalone client or as a Java applet. For the user, this means that access to the powerful processing system is attained with any Java-enabled computer and web browser. We call this design the Internet Seismic Processing System (INSP). Internet technology has reached "critical mass'" faster than any new technology in recent history by reaching fifty million users in just five years. The energy industry alone has spent three billion dollars on Internet technologies in 1999 alone, and companies like Conoco have already used the Internet for collaborative business partnerships and projects (Ref. 3). Both Chevron and Schlumberger have established efforts to access, share, and distribute well and seismic data over the Internet (Ref. 4). Computing resources for production processing and imaging of seismic data are outsourced by several major oil companies for both routine seismic processing and research.