Web Map Services

Web Map Service Helps You Share the Rich Content of Petrosys Maps.

Petrosys mapping sits centrally within your organization’s mapping workflows and is a vital tool in helping your organization in sub-surface exploration and development workflows, connected to the most important E&P and GIS information sources used in these processes.

Importantly, Petrosys maps are a natural extension of the geoscientist’s work, helping to communicate subsurface interpretation, modeling and development ideas, such as the mapping of reservoir parameters, structures and mission-critical well, seismic, permit and other knowledge.

The ability to directly display WMS imagery in Petrosys maps can assist greatly with the inclusion of images in maps and the management of image assets. A wide variety of imagery is available from WMS servers - including satellite and aerial photography - with many sources free for use. Providing images/maps via WMS instead of files helps to centralise the data, assists with the management of assets and provides a universal distributed computing platform - removing the potential proliferation of various versions of large images throughout file systems and enabling data sharing across distributed physical locations.

Being able to publish Petrosys maps to a WMS helps your organization distribute the information contained in maps and subsurface models to others in a way that fits ideally into their workflows. A real benefit is that Petrosys maps visually integrate information together from the vast array of corporate, E&P project and GIS information sources, for publishing as a service and subsequent consumption throughout your organization. This helps more people to connect with the information they need to make better decisions. This capability opens up the rich content of Petrosys maps for more people more easily, simplifying access to your key sub-surface exploration and development information and to data from your master data management and GIS workflows.

What is a web map service?

A Web Map Service (WMS) is an open, industry standard protocol for serving geo-referenced map images that are generated by a map server into a variety of client canvases. It is a ‘real-time’ mapping request – this means each WMS request triggers a regeneration of the map and the query for the content encapsulated by that map.

Depending on your business rules and needs, you can structure your WMS implementation to allow access to ‘real-time' maps, maps catalogued at project decision milestones and even publish template maps which are fed dynamic parameters based on simple user inputs such as date, year and basin.

The diagram below illustrates the concept of publishing a Petrosys map; combining production, structural grids, contours, faults, well and seismic knowledge from a range of data sources as a WMS, for consumption by other applications:

Petrosys maps can readily display WMS content.

WMS imagery can be displayed on Petrosys maps using the .../Display/Picture/Raster option. WMS images are standard raster data formats (eg png or jpeg) that are accessed from a web server rather than read from a file-based source. A wide variety of imagery is available from WMS servers - including satellite and aerial photography - with many sources free for use. WMS images are geo-referenced, as the imagery is accessed from servers according to a particular area of interest.

In Petrosys, the access area is based on the current mapsheet and zoom level, which keeps the amount of data retrieved to a minimum.  Petrosys allows for a pre-configured list of servers to be made available to all users on a project or site basis, for easy access and control. No additional licensing outside of the ‘base suite’ model of Petrosys is required to access this function.

Publishing a Petrosys map as a WMS for consumption in other workflows.

Any layer that can be displayed in a Petrosys map layer can be published to a WMS process. Maps are constructed and authored in the Petrosys desktop application. Once you have a Petrosys map and would like to publish it, a wizard will guide you through the steps.

The wizard (shown above) assists the user to publish a single map as a WMS server process. The WMS server is a background process that runs on a Petrosys-compatible computer server which has access to the maps, databases, and related project data, the display of which is to become web-enabled. When this process has been installed and configured correctly, it provides a 'URL' or web access address that can be called up from web pages and other WMS compliant applications to view the map.

WMS is a standard protocol managed by the Open Geospatial Consoritium Inc. (OGC). Refer to the OGC WMS standards page for more information.