【正文】 5), once a major Epicentre development, is now deceased, reflecting both Oracle and Statoil’s changing priorities. BizTech (formerly COM) for Energy appears moribund, at least judging from its public website. Interestingly, both these projects were heralded by their protagonists as a new breed of servicepany funded standards initiatives with more focus and fiscal stability! On the product data/construction and engineering front, the POSC/CAESAR organization also appears to have gone extremely quiet. This reflects both the difficulty of replacing proprietary technologies by standards and the hegemony of the large construction panies.This review was abstracted from a Technology Watch report by The Data Room. The Data Room produces around 15 indepth Technology Watch reports per year, along with a detailed annual summary. For more information on The Data Room’s Technology Watch service tw Petroleum Open Software Corporation Open Spirit Corporation Well Information Transfer Standard American Petroleum Institute (APIPIDEX) Upstream IT standards review (December 2001) PDM brings you a review of standards body activity with exclusive reports from the American Petroleum Institute, the European Petroleum Survey Group, Geoshare, LAS, Open Spirit, the SEG, WITS and of course POSC and PPDM. When we last reviewed standards (PDM Vol. 4 N176。 5), we counted six different organizations in the upstream technical and business space. Since that time, one is officially deceased, one moribund, one quiescent and another has ‘gone mercial’. Life in the standards space can be dangerous! But some dotorgs are alive and kicking whether they are conservative, reflecting well established best practices, or like the XML brigade, cutting edge and speculative. PDM reports on the survivors and the ‘a(chǎn)lsorans’. APITena Allain heads up the American Petroleum Institute’s (API) ComProServ task group which has been established to investigate standards for financial transactions. ComProServ standards support the specification and execution of plex products and services. Allain told PDM how ComProServ’s twenty member panies have e up with XMLbased standards for thirteen transactions, along with a mon library and schema.Cement jobsComProServ works to describe plex services such as well casing programs or cement jobs at a data and work order level. Such information will then be traded back and forth between operators, contractors and suppliers. ComProServ began by looking at work done in the chemical and electronic industries (RosettaNet) and plans to reuse this work.EDIThe API work has its roots in previous EDIbased standards, used for invoicing of drilling and geophysical services. The EDI standards are freeform text based so the move to XML allows for more structuring of information, more context and metadata to be included. According to Allain, most US majors use the PIDEX EDI standards for services and joint interest billing, but there was less takeup for these standards in the smaller independents. The move to XML may increase takeup for the smaller players.If it ain’t broke…The ‘migration’ of EDI based standards that are in everyday use to embryonic XML standards is a highly charged subject. As they say in Texas, ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.’ Allain said that EDI is still going strong. Many users do not even deploy the latest versions of the EDI standards. The advent