Assessing the Quality of the Modelling of Continuous Variables in the 2D Domain – A Deterministic Approach Background Any quick search on Google on the subject of “Assessing the quality of models in the 2D domain” would provide tonnes of results, with a number of them referring to research papers proposing various ways to evaluate…
Read detailsRecently someone asked me how to use ESRI well symbols for bullets in MS Word documents and MS PowerPoint Presentations. Initially my first thought was to make a screen grab of the well symbol using Paint or Snagit, a useful utility software. This would provide a small image of the symbol that would be ideal.…
Read detailsWith the imminent arrival of ArcGIS Server 10 and its template-based online spatial data editing it looks as though map-based crowdsourcing (which has been around for a while via Google Earth etc.) will soon be a reality for the ESRI community. ESRI themselves have quite a neat example of this available on their website, monitoring the…
Read detailsWhen you start up a new ArcMap document, you almost immediately and probably unknowingly lock yourself into using either relative or full folder paths: A relative folder path specifies the location of files brought into the project in relation to where you have saved your ArcMap document for the project. A full folder path specifies…
Read detailsIn GIS terminology a ‘mask’ is a spatial layer that one uses to limit the ‘view’ of a region. For example, if you were looking at the geology of the North Sea region, but only really interested in the marine environment you might employ a ‘land mask’. This would be a polygon that lies on…
Read detailsI was very interested by a recent blog by David Bamford on the subject of behavioural economics. The bottom line is that buyers of technology are fickle and not altogether objective when it comes to buying new technology, for a variety of very human reasons: Benefits are only realised sometime in the future Benefits are…
Read detailsInternational oil and gas companies are presented with so many exploration opportunities that they cannot all be actively pursued. In order to decide where to commit resources the exploration opportunities need to be analysed and ranked (preferably as quickly as possible), based upon the quality of each opportunity and the risks (geologic, engineering and economic) associated…
Read detailsUnconventional Gas The interest in unconventional gas exploration has significantly grown over the last decade following advances in drilling technology and exploration methods for monitoring and extracting unconventional gas [1,2,3]. Shale Gas has now become a target for new exploration and exploitation. Recent articles indicate the increase in the amount of Shale Gas plays that…
Read detailsWe sometimes find datasets containing attribute data that we can’t use effectively because the data is not stored correctly. A common example is a field containing dates where the field type is defined as ‘Text’. This results in difficulties filtering the dataset by date, e.g. “display data older than X”. In this petroleum GIS tip we take the common…
Read detailsThe UK government launched its 26th offshore oil and gas licensing round last week. The round includes new “Frontier” licences, with an extended nine-year exploration term, as well as some new tax breaks to stimulate activity. Blocks are being offered in all UK territorial waters for the first time in 12 years. It’s a massive…
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