Oracle at Conoco
The North Sea Exploration Unit of Conoco, the international energy production group, has
the responsibility for locating oil and gas deposits. However their work is not finished
once a deposit has been found and the decision has been made to drill. They have to draw
on additional expertise, in order that the maximum output from the drilling is maintained,
by optimising the drilling paths. Unless the Unit has access to existing stored data, the
work can be unnecessarily difficult.
Conoco called on Oracle to bring together their operational and legacy databases to enable
them to look for similarities across their operations. The end solution was an integrated
document management solution that allows users to access, and if necessary edit, any kind
of information in any format stored anywhere in the company. To enable them to achieve
this aim, Oracle put together a data warehouse with their ConText advanced search engine.
"In addition to the normal search facilities that users come to expect from a search
engine, ConText can be used to perform in-depth linguistic analysis of an English script
document and produce a 'theme' from it" says Oracle's Business Intelligence Marketing
Manager, Chris Ward. "This allows queries to be performed to retrieve documents based
on the main topics and concepts found in the documents."
All the paper documents from the North Sea Exploration Unit, including correspondence,
faxes and procedures were scanned and OCR'd together with image files and Microsoft Office
files into Oracle's Universal Server. "The state of the art search engines can perform
diagram searches and can almost perform facial recognition."
The human interface to the search engine was chosen as Netscape's browser since it was
already widely used throughout the Conoco. "You need a simple presentation tool" said Ward,
"and the standard is web-based."
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