Toward a Semantic Management of Geological Modeling Workflows

Today, the petroleum industry demonstrates a greater concern toward ecology. Actions are undertaken in order to reduce the CO2 emissions in particular. Storing the CO2 in depleted petroleum reservoirs represents one of the ways of controlling the CO2 emissions. However, a prior modeling of the reservoirs has to be done for a secure storage. This geological modeling task follows series of complex workflows (business processes) of data processing services. These workflows are built without any methodological rule. It is difficult for geologists to execute workflows or even services that they have not designed. Moreover, it is not possible to build new workflows without having a precise knowledge on the compounding services and sub-workflows. We claim that in order to solve the two stated problems, explicit semantics has to be applied to describe the workflows and the services that compose them. In this article, we first explain how geologists operate today. Then, we show how we enrich geological modeling workflows, the services that compose them and the data they manipulate with semantic indexations through ontology-based characterizations (Geological Data and Services Ontologies). Finally, we explain how our approach supports reuse of existing workflows and build new ones.