03 May Powering Knowledge Discovery and Knowledge Flow with AI
By Reid G. Smith, Ph.D., i2k Connect Inc., and John S. Boden, SPE International, May 3, 2019
The vision of the Society of Petroleum Engineers is to enable the global oil and gas E&P industry to share technical knowledge needed to meet the world’s energy needs in a safe and environmentally responsible manner. SPE is the industry’s leading publisher of technical papers, best practices and lessons learned. However, the increasing volume of information and diversity of channels make it difficult to connect with the knowledge and subject matter experts needed to solve problems. As a result, cross‐industry knowledge flow is impaired. To address the challenge, SPE has implemented a new research portal, supported by artificial intelligence (AI). The portal integrates subject matter expert knowledge with AI natural language processing and machine learning. It automatically enriches documents by classifying them into relevant taxonomies, geotagging oil fields, and extracting key concepts, authors, and institutions. These enrichments enable SPE members to zero in on the relevant information from all SPE channels and to graphically analyze timeframes, geography, related concepts and cross industry collaboration (using social network analysis).