Public Funding for Ovationdata Limited

Awaiting Public Project Summary

Virtual Post and OvationData are collaborating to create POPPA (Post Production Provided Anywhere) a new infrastructure and service for clients to address the urgent needs of companies in the production and post-production sectors due to the impact of COVID-19; as well as providing a more sustainable workflow for the long-term. POPPA will allow companies to quickly and easily set up staff to work remotely with a fully provisioned toolset for film and television work under the COVID-19 climate. The main motivation for our project is to attempt to counter problems caused by COVID-19 where after lockdown, productions were shut down and the usual industry practices involved people in proximity to each other were prevented. OvationData will use their expertise in cloud provision and equipment provision on which Virtual Post will provide a flexible toolset which can be tailored for each client's needs whilst maintaining security protocols. Through this pandemic, the media and entertainment industry has developed an appetite for change. Furthermore, society as a whole has adjusted to remote working and are open to working differently. Many companies have had to pivot to adjust for remote working; with this way of working set to establish itself hence, we feel our project extremely relevant in the current climate. We wish to offer the fastest and safest route out of the present situation, allow productions to get back on schedule, and offer ways of working that will help in case of a 'second spike' of COVID-19\. By developing a virtual post-production environment we will allow teams to work remotely, but maintain the collaboration and on-premise experience as before. With minimal COVID-19 risk as there is no requirement to meet in person and minimal reliance on exchanging physical media. The aim is for our solution to be sustainable in the long term. After catching up the backlog of productions, we will provide for clients and prospects to work from anywhere, reduce costs and efficiencies through new workflows and remote technology. By not owning equipment, there are zero costs in downtime. The same goes for physical premises. By eliminating and reducing such costs production efficiency is improved, and production becomes more environmentally sustainable because of the travel reductions. Our solution will additionally cater effectively for those that cannot work a 9-5 Monday to Friday job. Those that have care responsibilities or other location restrictions can contribute to projects when it is convenient for them by using our new service provision from POPPA.

OPAA -- Oil Production Advanced Analytics will improve the analysis of oil exploration so that the success rate of oil well exploration for production increases whilst simultaneously reducing costs in the process. Currently, oil discovery and analysis is carried out by teams of engineers and geologists. These specialists analyse separate types of data such as seismic data or the various types of data provided by test drilling well lines including rock type, radiation, magnetic properties, temperature and pressure at different depths. The current human interpretation is subjective and not very accurate, and can be costly due to the limited number of experts in this field. Ovation Data will use its position as a curator for many of the world's largest oil companies' data along with public domain surveys to provide a new analysis service. This service would allow companies to analyse not only newly surveyed data but historical data that had previously been deemed inconclusive or too costly to analyse, to better ascertain if there is potential value at exploration locations. Our proposal will address the needs of the industry by applying Machine Learning algorithms to analyse both seismic and well line data, and attain better overall correlation and analysis for oil companies to evaluate before they decide to begin production drilling. The Department of Earth Science & Engineering at Imperial College London will research, analyse and propose the most suitable algorithms to suit the multimodal data types as part of the proposal. Ovation's service would be more cost effective for oil companies than the traditional method of analysis. Oil companies will become more profitable via better analysis and a higher rate of success. This project would additionally benefit the UK taxpayer via making better use of North Sea oil reserves. In a world where hydrocarbons are required not only for fuel but our everyday life with materials such as plastics the need to make a better more efficient oil discovery process is paramount.

EXARCHIVE is a 24 month project to develop a scalable platform and software system for the long-term preservation, archiving and management of Oil & Gas survey data in repositories that may range from the hundred Petabyte to Exabyte scale. Survey and well data are extremely valuable and long-lived: data sets may be required years or decades after capture. Oil and Gas Exploration and Production (EP) is beginning to move from physically archiving data tapes offline toward a data chain built on file-based preservation with access to any dataset on-line, on demand. EXARCHIVE will develop technology and workflows to keep digital data objects secure, in multiple copies at different geographic locations, over periods that may be longer than the lifetime of any particular file format or storage system. It will enable the preservation of not only the data but also the metadata that defines the archive structure, file formats and processing, to allow indefinite replication of data sets and their analyses as formats and platforms change over decades. The approach will conform to the OAIS ISO standard for archival data preservation. The platform is expected to support highly automated processes for cataloguing, migration, replication and disaster recovery via remote locations using private Cloud storage connected by dark fibre networks. DPTS will offer services, using the resulting system, for data ingest, classification and cataloguing; data access management; long-term data archiving, storage and recall, with disaster recovery and duplicated on-line data sets held at remote facilities. There will be spillover applications to other sectors, including scientific, medical and media archiving. DPTS, is a well-established specialist provider of data processing, transcription and archiving for the Oil and Gas EP industry. Experts in distributed computing systems from Imperial College, London, will provide consultancy and support on advanced research aspects of the project.