Early-stage open standards proposal for a new OASIS technical committee for locational, volumetric, condition and asset quality references to natural geothermal power sources. Provided to us for the purposes of gathering comment on feasibility and scope.

1. Potential Geothermal Energy Data Standards Project
Note: This proposal has no official status and may change or be withdrawn.
OASIS is exploring the feasibility of launching a project to identify requirements and create common data
structures for geothermal energy information standards. All interested parties are invited to comment on this
discussion, which potentially will be used to determine the scope and direction for a new Technical Committee at
OASIS.
Premise: Exploitation of geothermal resources requires operational and informational resources that are
broadly similar to petroleum exploration: 1) robust three-dimensional location coordinates; 2) a long life cycle for
data, as resources pass through exploration, extraction/installation, estimation and production; and 3)
heterogeneous metadata for the relevant geology, geophysics, tectonics, hydrology, biology and ecologic
attributes of sites.
The wide range of data is occasioned by the need to estimate development and production costs at various
potential geothermal sites, where a long lead time and significant upfront investment is required. However, at
this early stage, access and control of geothermal resource information – both reservoir estimation of natural
resources, and the capabilities of extraction/generation equipment may be significantly less privatized than the
data marketplace for petroleum deposits. In the geothermal sector, much of the data and some significant public
policy imperatives still vest in government agencies and the public sector.
As a result, widespread data sharing and calculations based on interoperable compatible data are needed, so
harmonized data structures will be of immediate value.
As utilities and regulators contemplate the integration of geothermal into national supply grids, this body of data
also will come under pressure to be interoperable, and upwardly compatible, with a second body of work: the
various systems and taxonomies that will be used by advanced prediction, control and metrology practices to
operate those power grids.
Outcomes: A project to identify requirements and create common data structures for geothermal energy
information standards likely would need to consider the following tasks:
-- Core set of methods for 3D geoposition statements that:
- tie to readily available statistics;
- explicitly handle volumetrics;
- are upwardly compatible with future definitive systems under development (like EU's INSPIRE); and
- tie out to human-readable / common-vernacular location data, if possible.
-- Assembled taxonomy for scientific data statements about various physical matters of hydrology, tectonics,
geology, etc., which should:
- re-use or be referenceable to established SI measures; and
- be compatible with semantic operations, e.g., capable of distinguishing between primary absolute data and
derived/interpreted data.
-- Robust extensible metadata to accommodate future extended needs (e.g., source or generation-method
identification more fine-grained than might be requested today).
-- Open-ended ability to append additional data in various unanticipated formats, such as image and chart data.
-- Data and message format that permits enveloping of the foregoing into forms compatible with widespread
asynchronous sharing, messaging, database calls, and data exchange transactions among heterogeneous
systems.
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Please comment on the above points. Do you agree there is a need to identify geothermal energy information
standards? Do the above lists accurately reflect the scope of work that's needed? Are there other issues that
should be considered before launching this project?