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Case Study: Rio Tinto Exploration Adds Location-Based Intelligence to Streamline Information Discovery and Document Retrieval Process
SIS and MetaCarta facilitate more efficient resource prospecting and decision making
Challenge
Rapidly index legacy documents related to mining and energy prospects; enable geoscientists to instantly discover and retrieve stored reports and other data relevant to their specific areas of interest.
Solution
Implement MetaCarta for oil and gas† geographic text search and referencing system with the following turnkey capabilities:
- crawl and index a large number of documents
- automatically geotag documents to map locations
- provide a map-based user search tool in a Web environment.
Results
Improved information retrieval efficiency, prospect identification, and decision making; made available over 88% of legacy documents; accomplished results at one-tenth the cost of using a manual metadatacataloging approach, taking 3 weeks rather than 1 year.
From paper to digital—compelling reasons
For the past 10 years, Rio Tinto Exploration Pty Limited had been storing its archived documents in a large warehouse facility located in Yarraville, Australia. These hardcopy documents, dating back to the 1940s, presented retrieval difficulties due to the sheer volume of information stored and the challenge of locating relevant items among stacks of shelves and boxes. To find background for a particular project area required a visit to a remote, industrial site and working multiple days on a single request. The annual cost of maintaining the warehouse was becoming burdensome and, when a fire broke out in the adjacent building, concern grew for the physical safety of these important legacy documents.
For these compelling reasons, the decision was made to convert warehoused hardcopy documents and reports into electronic format.
Digital documents—how to search and find
Initially, Rio Tinto Exploration investigated a traditional method of document conversion and cataloging. This would have involved the use of a company to first scan and convert the paper documents using optical character recognition (OCR), and then manually read through all of the content and create metadata that could be used by a database search engine. This method of tagging the documents’ metadata would have taken an enormous amount of time and money, and still not have provided full-content search capability.
The needs of Rio Tinto Exploration geoscientists were better served by an alternative method, which would automatically generate geographic metadata and render entire document contents searchable, displaying the desired results in less time and for a fraction of the cost.
Schlumberger Information Solutions (SIS) was engaged to deliver its MetaCarta geographic text search solution. This unique search technology automates the process of crawling and indexing documents at a rate of 10–100 documents per second, and then, without human intervention, makes the content “location-aware” by geotagging predefined types of data onto a map-based search engine.
Natural language processing—crawl and index documents by named locations
A third-party company scanned original paper documents and used OCR on the results to create searchable electronic text. These scanned documents were then georeferenced using MetaCarta to crawl and tag documents to specific locations. This technology uses natural language processing algorithms to identify and extract geographic names from text and associate the names with actual map locations. The location extraction is tuned for oil, gas, mining, and energy features, allowing users to search for documents based on relevant details like countries, cities, towns, basins, wells, fields, concessions, permits, and other named company assets.
Location-based search—discover what you didn’t know you had
By simply clicking on a map location, Rio Tinto Exploration geoscientists can now quickly zoom into an area of interest and find all obtainable documents relevant to that geographic region. MetaCarta also allows specific Boolean keyword searches, and can be used as a valuable information discovery tool for things about which the searcher knows absolutely nothing. Imagine asking the question: “What information do we have in this particular location? I do not know what we have, show me everything!” MetaCarta does the rest.
Demonstrated appreciable time and money savings
Rio Tinto Exploration recognized the project’s value after just 2 weeks into the startup and data crawl phase. Of the thousands of documents from Yarraville, over 88% were electronically crawled and strategically positioned on the world map. The entire project was completed in under a month’s time at a price that was a fraction of the manual metadata-cataloging project estimates. Essentially, what would have taken a year or more was accomplished in just 3 weeks for approximately one-tenth of the cost.
After the results became fully available through MetaCarta, Rio Tinto was able to retrieve archive information on possible prospects in seconds rather than days.
Schlumberger Information Solutions
Schlumberger Information Solutions (SIS) is an operating unit of Schlumberger that provides software, information management, IT, and related services. SIS collaborates closely with oil and gas companies to solve today’s tough reservoir challenges with an open business approach and comprehensive solution deployment. Through our technologies and services, oil and gas companies empower their people to improve business performance by reducing exploration and development risk and optimizing operational efficiencies.
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