【正文】 of low cost bandwidth has significantly reduced the costs of EDI transactions. On the other hand, XML is not all that cheap – particularly when the costs of an Enterprise Application Integration platform such as Tibco is included in the calculation.EPSGBP’s Roger Lott heads up the European Petroleum Survey Group (EPSG). Lott told PDM how the EPSG started out as an informal meeting of senior survey personnel from the major North Sea operators. In the mid 1980’s, the group pooled internally piled data on worldwide coordinate systems, which grew into a significant resource, which was leveraged by POSC in the Epicentre data model.GeoTIFFEPSG standards have seen takeup outside of the oil and gas industry – particularly by satellite image specialist SPOT which rolled the POSC/EPSG work into the GeoTIFF standard for geodetically referenced bitmap imagery. The EPSG work has been further leveraged through the Open GIS Consortium, extending the EPSG’s work into the Geographical Information System munity at large. The EPSG data set is now a de facto worldwide reference and is available online as an Access data base from the EPSG website.ISO 19111The EPSG currently working on a new version of its specification which will bee the ISO 19111 geodetic standard. This will be available in the next release of the EPSG database – Version . The EPSG plays something of a proselytizing role with respect to the GIS industry – in the hope that promotion of the EPSG standards will help its members. Other EPSG work includes the issuance of ‘guidance notes’ – best practices for the positioning business.GeoshareJack Gordon (Conoco), who chairs the Geoshare user group told PDM that “Geoshare is still in use, judging by the 3000 hits per week to the Geoshare website”. Most visitors are looking at the data model itself. Geoshare is a stable data transfer environment with few requests for changes. There have been proposals for an XMLbased version of Geoshare, this is still under discussion. Gordon believes that the current Geoshare model, based on the API RP66 protocol, still has merit. The standard offers a sophisticated environment, with builtin support for units of measure (UOM). It is efficient for binary data and is ‘selfdocumenting.’ But Gordon acknowledges “XML is a wonderful tool – it is great to be able to read the ASCII information.” In any event, future XML standards should build on prior work such as Geoshare’s UOM standards.Finder to OpenWorksOne significant usage of Geoshare is to connect Finder to Landmark’s Open Works. An Excel mapping of Finder and OpenWorks attributes is available on the Geoshare website. Who uses Geoshare today? According to Gordon, Conoco does along with Anadarko and Burlington. From Schlumberger’s ongoing support for the standard, one suspects that the technology still has currency within GeoQuest, but if there are any big Geoshare projects out there, everyone must be sworn to secrecy! Geoshare is calling for papers for the April PNEC conference (see page 10) which follows the AGM.LASLAS chairman Kenneth Heslop told PDM that the version 3 of the Log ASCII Standard (LAS) is currently under consideration by several administrations as the required standard for data submission. LAS handles well logs, core analysis, well tests, and deviation surveys. One current LAS project involves creating a new code system to replace the old API codes and content rul