Blog

For E&P companies, the next challenge in their digital transformation — once their data has been properly stored, indexed, enriched, and cataloged in the cloud — is to make it available in a collaborative way where users can easily interact with the data through exploration, computation, and analysis. To create this digital workspace, companies must […]

The IVAAP data model was created after researching the commonalities between the industry data models. However, when we built it, we kept in mind that each data store carries its own set of information, information that is useful for users to consume. This is why we made “properties” a part of the data model itself. From an IVAAP SDK point of view. “Properties” is a set of name-value pairs that you can associate with specific entities within the IVAAP Data Model.

One of the productivity features of the IVAAP Data Backend SDK is that the services developed with this SDK are container agnostic. Practically, it means that a REST service developed on your PC using your favorite IDE and deployed locally to Apache Tomcat will run without changes on IVAAP’s Play cluster. While the Data Backend SDK is traditionally used to serve data, it is also a good candidate when it comes to developing non-data related services. For example, as part of IVAAP 2.8, we worked on a “gridding” service. In a nutshell, this service computes a grid surface based upon the positions of a top across the well of a project. When we tested this service, we didn’t deploy it to IVAAP’s cluster, it was deployed as a standalone application, as a servlet, on a virtual machine (VM).

INT is pleased to announce the newest release of its enterprise data visualization platform, IVAAP™ 2.8. This release includes new, game-changing machine learning capabilities utilizing IVAAP’s services-based architecture to quickly plug new processes and workflows into IVAAP’s data visualization admin. 

This release incorporates more features to support development of cloud-based applications for clients in O&G, energy, and other industries. Houston, TX — May 04, 2021 — INT is pleased to announce GeoToolkit.JS™ 2021, the latest release of INT’s industry-leading data visualization toolkit and libraries for developers. This release brings exciting new features for 3D visualization, […]

The latest version of INT’s data visualization platform, IVAAP, integrates with IBM Open Data for Industries, IBM’s hybrid cloud implementation of the Open Group OSDU data. HOUSTON, TX — April 15, 2021 — INT today announced that IVAAP — a leading enterprise subsurface data visualization platform — integrates with IBM Open Data for Industries for […]

The latest INTViewer 2021 introduces a new well data structure, the Extended Well Data (EWD). Like the existing well data based on LAS files, EWD can be displayed in the Well Log Window. They can be displayed in Map views, 3D, and seismic viewers as well. This new format allows more complex edition operation, heterogeneous log curves in the same well data, and a new time/depth conversion process. 

As a long-standing OSDU Forum Member, INT has worked closely with the OSDU development teams to ensure seamless integration of IVAAP visualization of OSDU data on all major cloud providers. Houston, TX – March 24, 2021 – INT is pleased to announce our partnership with The Open Group OSDU™ Forum as part of the new […]

The upcoming release of INTViewer 2021 has new map features including a RemoteMap plugin and support for the import and export of GeoTIFF files. In the previous version of the RemoteMap plugin, users could use a Web Map Tile Service like Google or Bing to visualize in the background. In the 2021 update, we have added the possibility to set up a custom WMS server.

INT is pleased to announce the newest release of INTViewer. This release includes a RemoteMap plugin, support for the import and export of GeoTIFF files, a new extended well data structure, and flexible license borrowing.

Data management can benefit from a single point of access of all subsurface data, simplifying data exchange, sharing, and consumption. For data managers, OSDU can enable new technology solutions that aggregate data, simplify search, and improve discoverability. Paired with the right subsurface data visualization platform technology, OSDU can pave the way to automate tedious tasks, workflows, and analysis, ultimately providing quicker information to stakeholders for faster decisions.

Aging workforces, low oil prices, and pressure to reduce environmental footprint are all forcing E&P companies to rethink how they operate; which is why there is so much interest in embracing digital transformation. But digital transformation is more than the use of new digital technologies to optimize workflows and improve business processes.

One of the unique capabilities of IVAAP is that it works with the cloud infrastructure of multiple vendors. Whether your SEGY file is posted on Microsoft Azure Blob Storage, Amazon S3 or Google Cloud Storage, IVAAP will be capable of visualizing it.

Highlights from the IVAAP 2.7 release include many advanced search and map capabilities, improved 3D widget filter dialog, new interval curves support, new date/time picker for Cross-Plot widget axis settings, and more! 

The oil and gas industry is historically one of the first industries generating actionable data in the modern sense. For example, the first seismic imaging was done in 1932 by John Karcher. Since that first primitive image, seismic data has been digitized and has grown exponentially in size. It is usually represented in monolith data sets which may span in size from a couple of gigabytes to petabytes if pre-stack. The long history, large amount of data, and the nature of the data pose unique challenges that often make it difficult to take advantage of advancing cloud technology. Here is a high-level overview of the challenges of working with oil and gas data and some possible solutions to help companies take advantage of the latest cloud technologies. 

INT is pleased to announce the newest release of GeoToolkit.JS data visualization libraries and toolkit. This major release includes new 3D visualization capabilities—contour 3D, 3D shape highlighting, and better 3D seismic—and new rendering options.

As the use cases of IVAAP grow, the implementation of the data backend evolves. Past releases of IVAAP have been focused on providing data portals to our customers. Since then, a new use case has appeared where IVAAP is used to validate the injection of data in the cloud. Both use cases have a lot in common, but they differ in the way errors should be handled.

One of the most challenging data management problems faced in the industry is with seismic files. Some oil and gas companies estimate that they acquire a petabyte of data per day or more. Domain knowledge and specific approaches are required to move, access, and visualize that data. In this blog post, we will dive deep into the details of modern technology that can be useful to achieve speed up.

INT has been working with the Open Subsurface Data Universe™ (OSDU) consortium since the beginning of the OSDU forum in 2019. INT made IVAAP available as part of the Demo release of the OSDU platform. The OSDU is a standard data platform for the oil and gas industry which will reduce silos and put data at the center of the subsurface community.

Map-based search is an integral part of subsurface data visualization. In order to meet usability expectations, developers of subsurface applications in the cloud must add powerful map and map-based search functionalities. The GeoToolkit map widget simplifies the process, allowing users to get quick and clear insights using common web mapping services.

This release confirms IVAAP as a leader in the subsurface data visualization space, supporting Data Visualization and Data Management for Subsurface, Exploration, Drilling, or Production Applications in the cloud. Houston, TX — INT is pleased to announce the newest release of its HTML5 upstream visualization platform, IVAAP™ 2.6, accelerating the pace of our release cycle […]

Weatherford International plc (OTC Pink: WFTLF) announced a strengthened collaboration with upstream data visualization provider INT to provide next-level, real-time well visualization in both 2D and 3D. Weatherford will embed INT’s IVAAP framework into the Weatherford Centro™ digital well delivery software, advancing its data visualization capabilities.

INT has been a long-time pioneer by providing JavaScript components that empower developers to build geoscience applications that run in a browser. The GeoToolkit.JS libraries cut years of development time for any company creating a new application or replacing a legacy system. However, the added value of this kind of application is not just in accessing and visualizing geoscience data, it’s also in the integration of the company’s knowledge within this application.

Despite the advantages of 3D rendering and the trend of migrating applications to web browsers, there are various obstacles that developers have to face and overcome. The steep learning curve, the insufficient cross-platform support, and the difficulty of maintaining make WebGL a beast to work with. In a way, we want to keep the obstacles away from web developers, so INT provides Carnac3D, a subset of GeoToolkit, as an industry-leading graphical product.

Recently, INT announced our partnership with Bluware and our integration of Bluware’s OpenVDS format into IVAAP, our enterprise data visualization platform. We are very excited about this partnership, as well as our collaboration with OSDU. This new format was designed to empower users to browse seismic data in the cloud with high performance and lower cost.

IVAAP on OSDU R2 supports seismic visualization, data aggregation with unparalleled performance in the cloud to serve large seismic volumes using IVAAP’s HTML5 technology combined with OpenVDS format.

Interactive Network Technologies, Inc. (INT) a leader in advanced domain visualization in digital exploration and production (E&P) and Bluware Corp., the digital platform that enables the oil and gas industry to accelerate digital transformation initiatives and adopt cloud computing for subsurface data, are pleased to announce the integration of Volume Data Store (VDS), a data format with adaptive streaming technology for seismic data storage, into IVAAP, an upstream data visualization platform. 

When doing demos of IVAAP, the wow factor is undeniably its user interface, built on top of GeoToolkit.JS. What users of IVAAP typically don’t see is the part accessing the data itself, the IVAAP backend. When we designed the IVAAP backend, we wanted our own customers to be able to extend its functionalities

GeoToolkit is a suite of 2D and 3D data visualization libraries that display well log, seismic, contour, schematics, BHA, maps, and more in JavaScript. Released earlier this year, GeoToolkit.JS 2020 comes with various new features and significant improvements. Highlights from the latest release include: improved ArcGIS support, faster load times, new tools, multilateral schematics, new gridding algorithms, and improved memory for volumetric rendering.

INT is pleased to announce the latest release of its enterprise upstream visualization platform, IVAAP™ 2.5. This version includes new production dashboards to enhance analysis and monitoring. Support for curve dictionaries and aliases makes it easier to build powerful log templates. IVAAP now fully supports the display of raster logs in well and correlation views (with support for TGS SmartRASTER® format).

Feedback is key to the improvement of any software. INTViewer has many long-time users, and one piece of feedback that I sometimes receive is that “it takes too many clicks to reach an often-used feature.” Fortunately, with many years of real-world usage under its belt, the usability of INTViewer has been fine-tuned. These “missing” shortcuts are already built-in, I just didn’t do a good job communicating these improvements to our users. So here is our list of the 5 most overlooked INTViewer shortcuts.

As a non-developer living in a developer world, I wanted to understand more about why we develop our software to work with Kubernetes. So I sat down with INT’s Senior Product Manager Steven Reynolds and Senior Architect James Velasco to learn more about Kubernetes and the advantages of working with it.

2019 has been a year full of milestones. INT celebrated its 30 years and has made IVAAP available to all members of the OSDU consortium as part its demo release. But this year has seen many more achievements, and among them is the consolidation of INT products as a complete ecosystem, an ecosystem centered around geoscience data, built for the cloud.

Bluware Corp., the digital innovation platform for seismic data, is pleased to announce a strategic partnership with Interactive Network Technologies, Inc. (INT), a leader in multi-domain visualization in exploration and production (E&P). Bluware and INT are early members in the Open Subsurface Data Universe (OSDU), a forum focused on developing a standard that creates a common data platform for all exploration, development, and well data. The standard will transform the way subsurface data is captured, analyzed, and operated.

Working at INT for 10 years, what has made me show up every morning has been the deep technical aspects of the job, the products I have been able to work on, and the people I interact with. Frankly speaking, these 10 years were also possible because developers at INT are seen as an investment, not a cost. Unlike other companies, INT has a strong will to weather tough economic cycles without shrinking its staff. I have grown with INT, and we both keep growing together.

Cloud storage connectors, ArcGIS and PPDM integrations are part of the many new features of the latest release of IVAAP (2.3) which pushes the limits of what’s possible in Subsurface Data Visualization in web applications. This version has significantly developed support for visual-based data discovery using map-based search, and is fully integrated with ArcGIS, allowing explorers to search structured and unstructured data in a data lake or any other file repository. IVAAP supports elastic search as well as other search engines and is able to index and read any subsurface data types.

Programming is an activity that requires a special set of cognitive skills. While the industry has developed processes and tools to ensure the quality of software artifacts, the act of writing code is a craft in itself. Developers pride themselves on the “big picture” results they achieve, but the activity of programming is definitely a humbling experience: it’s easy to introduce bugs, and regardless of whether I catch them right away or later in the pipeline, I hate to be reminded I am inherently flawed and have introduced a defect. For this article, I will focus on simple methods to avoid bugs, not before or after you write code, but while you write that code.

One of the unique features of the IVAAP backend SDK is that you can develop your own data connectors and services with the IDE you are already familiar with. The data backbone of IVAAP is meant to be deployed in a cluster made of multiple nodes for scalability and reliability. However, despite the distributed nature of such a deployment, our SDK requires no particular plugin to compile or execute your code. The tools needed to develop a plugin for IVAAP’s backend are identical to the tools you would need to develop classic Java Servlets: a Java SDK (Oracle, OpenJDK), an IDE (Eclipse, NetBeans) and an application server (Tomcat, Glassfish).

Total and INT have recently announced a long-term corporate agreement that will give Total access to INT’s GeoToolkit, the most widely adopted JavaScript-based data visualization technology software in Oil and Gas. Total will also be able to take advantage of IVAAP, one of the leading Data Visualization software platforms for digital subsurface projects deployed in […]

Over the last few months, there have been a lot of activities and discussions with upstream majors on how to make subsurface data easier to search and discover and how to automate some of the geophysical and/or petrophysical workflows. This process has typically been very challenging. From a user experience perspective, the ideal scenario would be to do this from one system versus doing this very manually from current siloed applications. We’ve been able to do this successfully here at INT.

IVAAP was not just meant to be a web application “built for purpose”—we wanted it to be a platform that customers can extend on their own. With this goal is mind, the first component that we picked for IVAAP’s architecture was a “lookup” system. This system makes IVAAP easy to learn, yet versatile, and devops appreciate that they can leverage it when a fast turnaround is needed.

It’s been two years since Oracle announced the donation of the NetBeans source code to the Apache software foundation. This move was much more than a licensing change — it was a bit of a new beginning for NetBeans. With the release of NetBeans 10, now is a good time to look back and recognize the changes that this transition to Apache brought.

While some customers will use the portability of INTViewer to present their data, others will use INTViewer on a workstation, with multiple monitors. And instead of opening a handful of windows, they will open a few dozen. The typical use case for opening a large number of windows is when you want to monitor the multiple steps of a processing workflow. In such a use case where datasets are compared, it’s important that all visualizations share the same settings. INTViewer makes it really easy to open dozens of datasets at once. You can select a directory and open in one click all the datasets within that directory. But this is not where INTViewer’s productivity stops. Automatic synchronization facilitates the management of all these windows.

The purpose of IVAAP’s backend is to access data from many data sources and present this data in a unified manner to the IVAAP HTML5 client. Performance is key, and some data stores are faster to access than others. In a web service configuration, a smart caching strategy is required so that the same web/HTTP calls are not made to the same data store twice while a service request is being fulfilled, regardless of its complexity. This is where the concept of scope comes in.

As a new member of the software development team, I had no prior experience with development on IVAAP, INT’s HTML5 visualization framework for upstream E&P solutions. My first task was to add a data connector, so to gain knowledge of IVAAP and to understand more about the IVAAP software development kit, I used the IVAAP developer’s guide. I found this guide quite useful as it made the key points behind IVAAP easily understandable. Coding with IVAAP is actually easy, and I was surprised by several features of the platform and SDK that make it quite simple to learn.

I often have a hard time explaining to friends and family what exactly INTViewer does. The moment I use the word “seismic,” the listener's mind automatically shifts to the topics of seismic activity and earthquakes, and I need to explain oil & gas exploration technologies before I even get to the software. By then, I have lost my audience. Today, I’ll try a different technique: I’ll describe the capabilities of INTViewer that actually cater to earthquake mapping. I will show how you can use the built-in capabilities of INTViewer to map recent earthquake activities.

I often say that INTViewer is a bit of Swiss knife. It serves multiple purposes, and each company finds a different use. This makes it hard to decide which feature to highlight. In the past few years, as the industry moved to the cloud, we created a companion for INTViewer: INTGeoServer, which makes it easy to visualize data beyond the bounds of your network. This year, with the new release of INTViewer approaching, I will highlight the opposite feature of INTViewer: its ability to work offline, disconnected from the world.

In our previous blog, Simplifying the Learning Curve of the Seismic Unix Library, we described how INTViewer can leverage the SU library. This library is typically meant for Linux, but it can also be used on Windows. This walkthrough describes how to install the SU Library on Windows 10 to use the Seismic Workbench plugin.

Two decades after its creation, the Java runtime has finally become modular. A modular approach not only makes dependency management easier, but it also makes applications more efficient as unused modules don’t need to be loaded. The NetBeans Platform predates Java 9 and has been using its own module system for years. Since INTViewer is a desktop application built on top of the NetBeans Platform, I find that it is far superior to the Java 9 module system for my use cases.