Business and technical decisions are based on data that comes from many different sources. The primary question is, how is data found, gathered, organized, analyzed, and distributed? GeoTrek addresses the need for finding, selecting, viewing, and manipulating geoscience hard copy, physical and digital data from various data sources. It must be noted that each data source typically has its own data access method and data model, which necessitates GeoTrek to understand the data access method and the data model that are used by every data set. Assuming the data is gathered stored and organized in some electronic fashion, GeoTrek is used to find data by either selecting an area of interest and the associated overlapping data sources or by selecting data source outside an area of interest. It so happens that many data sources do not have geodetic coordinates, so GeoTrek provides also the ability to search data sources without coordinates.

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The main window of GeoTrek contains three main areas or panels: Map View panel, Information Display panel, and Data Sources panel. In addition the window contains five pull-down menus: File, Edit, View, Sources and Help and two permanent vertical tabs: Map and Info. Additional vertical tabs may be created as needed by the system to help manage certain processes (such as for example to help manage the process dealing with requesting data - seismic or well logs). After data loading, the use of the Text button will also prompt the system to display tables that are superimposed in the main window.

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The Map View Panel

The map view panel is located on the right side of GeoTrek main window and is where a map or geodetic data are displayed, selected, and queried. It consists of: a larger panel where an initial map of the geographical area is displayed; an information display area is used to show the lat/long coordinates, map projection and other information.

The Geographical map at this time displays the GOM and adjacent US states. Other states will be added over time, as new repositories join the NGDRS.

The Information display area shows the latitude/latitute and the X/Y projection position of the point as the mouse is moved across the map. As users zoom-in to the data, additional information maybe displayed. For example, the Gulf of Mexico area, the system (after a certain zoom-in magnification) displays the MMS block number.

The buttons are, in general, aggregated in related sets. The first set of buttons includes general information and screen navigation buttons (Select, Info, Zoom In, Zoom Out, Pan, Refresh, Fill, Blocks, Seismic Blocks, Hidden, Re-expose all). In general GeoTrek hides features until the zooming is sufficient to display the feature. This allows for less clutter of textual or graphic information at high levels of magnifications. Users should zoom-in and out a few times to get a sense of what features are shown at what magnifications.

• Select provides for the selection of individual points on the map by clicking on them. For example, a single well is selected by pointing to it and clicking the mouse. A group of wells are selected by drawing a box (clicking on the mouse button and dragging) around the wells of interest. The selection is a toggle function and is reversed by a performing a re-selection.
• Zoom In enables a user to Zoom-in to a portion of the current map. Zooming in may be done multiple times and may be zoomed back out by using the Zoom Out feature. After the zooming takes places, the user moves the slide bars to scroll/pan the map horizontally and vertically.
• Zoom Out enables users to zoom out of a current AOI.
• Pan provides users a means to move outside the current visible area by selecting a point on the map and dragging it to the new location. When the map view is zoomed in, selecting the Pan button allows the user to move the map to the desired view. To pan, users select the pan button, click on a point on the map and hold the mouse button down, while moving the selected point to the desired location. When the mouse button is released, the map redraws with the desired view.
• Refresh provides the user the capability to repaint the screen due to unexpected system problems. It retains the last mode used.
• Info enables the user to obtain supporting information about the object pointed to using the mouse.
• Fill enables the user to turn on a background color fill on the seismic surveys.
• Blocks enables the user to turn on the MMS block text.
• Seismic Blocks enables the user to select the blocks of interest for sending a request to the particular vendors.
• Hidden enables the user to hide certain overlapping seismic surveys.
• Re-expose all enables the user to re-expose the hidden surveys.

The information returned by GeoTrek varies considerably, depending on the type of data and conditions of the data set as shown below in Table 1:

Table 1: Info button behavior

The second set of buttons includes four buttons: Fill, Blocks, Hidden, and Re-Expose All. This set of buttons is used only for dealing with seismic data sets.

• Fill. When the system first displays a 3-D surveys, Fairfield for example, the system loads the survey outlines in color but does not filled-in the respective polygons. If the Fill button is clicked the system fills-in all surveys with different colors to improve the visibility of the surveys and therefore facilitate the user finding the searched data. It is a toggle button.
• Blocks is used to display or not display the MMS block names and numbers. Note that MMS blocks will only be display at certain zoom levels. At high levels (such as the whole GOM as the AOI) the blocks will not be displayed.
• Hidden is used to hide a single 3-D survey, again to improve visibility and make clear the outline of a particular survey. The exact outline of one survey may be obscured by another survey. This Hidden feature is used to hide those surveys for which the user has no interest.
• Re-Expose All is used to re-expose all the surveys that were hidden by the user using the Hidden feature.

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The Information Display Panel

This area is for informational purposes only. The upper area displays the coordinates for the Project Bounding Box (PBB) - the four corners of the area bounded by the geographical map area. Notice that, as a user zooms-in and out of the system, the PBB coordinates change.

To change and fix the PBB the users need to use AOI and/or Zoom In buttons. There are several ways of selecting the AOI. One option is to use Zoom In to select and display an AOI. Once the map is displayed on the screen and the desired area is selected, users choose the AOI menu and go to Set Area of Interest and then select View by Extent. This sets the coordinates for the AOI as displayed on the screen in the map view. The AOI may also be set within the window by typing in the four latitude and longitude coordinates.

The pull down menu Area of Interest has three options: By Viewing Extent, By Name or By Source. This menu is used to change the project AOI latitude and longitude settings. When selecting using the View By Extent option, the coordinates of the current map view, as created in the Zoom In, are selected. The By Name menu is used to select an AOI based on a previously selected geographic area. For example the by name feature is very useful when looking for data on a regional scale. Since each data source has a geographical bounding box the Data Source is used to select an AOI by a particular data source coordinates. This is a requirement when quick access to a single data source needs to be displayed on the map view, and it eliminates the need to go to the map view to set the AOI.

In some cases, users need to change the geodetic projection. GeoTrek enables for data to be displayed using several geodetic projection systems. For the data to overlay on a map from different data sources the coordinates must have a common projection. In the AOI window there is the opportunity to change the geodetic projection, if required, by selecting a geodetic projection from a list provided. If the projection needed is not available users should be able to request it using the instructions in the Contact Us pages.

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Data Sources Panel

The data sources serve many purposes including finding out if data exist, for decision processes, data ownership, physical location, quality of data if the attributes are provided, and many more uses that are related to data. This panel is located in the lower right hand corner of the GeoTrek main window and provides a list of data sources available.

If a data source is not present when first bringing up GeoTrek, users should access the Sources pull-down menu and use select Edit to find out if the data source exists but has not been selected to be part of the list in this panel. The system will bring a new window - Data Source List - displaying more details about the data sources and providing a series of new facilities. For example, data sources may be made active or inactive or may be added too or removed from the list. The data sources may also be arranged (by the user) in the list by using move top, bottom and up or down options. The chosen sequence of data sources will be reflected in the panel of the main window. This auxiliary window also informs the user if the data source is contained within the specific AOI boundaries by indicating a Yes or No.

The Data Source Panel also contains one check box and three buttons and pull down menus: the Check box is used to tell the system to retrieve data for a data source. Clicking on the check box initiates the downloading of data source from the server to the client. The horizontal bars below the data source icon shows the progress of the data retrieval process. A red bar indicates the progress of the data retrieval to be displayed on the map and the blue bar indicate the progress of the text retrieval. If there is a check mark in the box the data source has already been selected and is active. The Text button displays a text table created from a data source. The Drop/Stop makes the current selected data source inactive (drops it) or stops the current running retrieval. Query allows data to be sorted and selected. The data does not have to be displayed in a map view in a specific AOI to be queried as a text file. This feature is needed for accessing data sources that do not contain coordinate data; this is true for a lot of production data, financial data, cores and cuttings, hard copy data indexes, and other data. The Query function also appears under the View pull-down menu.

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Pull-down Menus

The main window also includes the following pull-down menus: File, Edit, View, Sources, and Help.

• File options include: Open, Save Script, Map to CGM, and Exit. All these options are not activated at the moment.
  
• Edit options include: Select All, Unselect All, Markup Map, Hide Unselected, Expose Hidden, Drop Hidden, and Preferences. All the other options, except Preferences allow user to manipulate data inside of tables. These options are explained below under Text Window: Manipulating Data. The Preferences option triggers a window listing work preferences. The window contains six areas each with two radio type buttons that allow user to choose the following:
  
• • Draw on map during/after loading
    
  • Draw on text during/after loading
    
  • Load text immediately/when requested
    
  • Load data for visible window/for area of interest
    
  • Update sources on zoom out/Sources unchanged on zoom-out
    
  • Save script of user actions/ Do not user action script
    
• View options include: Area of Interest and Error Display. The behavior of the Area of Interest is described above in The Information Display Panel. Error display is reserved for system staff to track software problems.
  
• Sources options include: Display All, Hide All, Drop All, Re-acquire All, and Edit. All these options are designed to facilitate managing the availability and loading of the data sources.
  
• Help options include: On this window, User Guide, About GeoTrek. The documentation is described below in On-line User Documentation.

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The data sources need to be activated by the putting a check in the Check box in the Data Source window. The checkmark initiates the retrieval of data from a particular data source. Several data sources may be brought up in parallel. GeoTrek enables users to click on several data sources, one right after the other, but the time needed to bring them all up is longer. In the Data Source panel there is a counter, a red scale bar that indicates how much data is being loaded. Once data loading completes the red bar changes to green and depicts the cumulative amount of memory used by the client software during the session. If the hardware give a message of not enough memory available user may have to restart application.

Once the data is retrieved the data can brought to the screen in a table using the Text feature. The data in the text table is selected in several different ways. The data may be selected with the mouse on the map or on the table. There is a relationship between the map view and the table, where the data source has coordinate data, which means that when a row(s) in the data table is selected then the well or seismic line or other data is highlighted on the map. If the selection is from the map then the row(s) is highlighted on the table. Both of these approaches are needed. If the well, for example, is known then it is very easy to select that well in the table and it is highlighted on the map. If the well location is known on the map then it may be easier to find the highlighted well in the table. The text table presents the user with five pull-down menus: File, Edit, View, Drill Down (if applicable) and Help.

Under the Edit pull-down menu the Select All and Unselect All functions are used to select or deselect all the data in a table. Once data is selected it can be moved to the top of the table by using Select to Top. This is needed for finding the required data and then bringing it to the top of the table for further selection or manipulation. Once the data is at the top of the table, it may be further selected by using the Hide Unselected function. This feature removes the data from view, but it is still accessible if needed later on. The deselected data may be brought back to the table by using Expose Hidden. If the objective is to remove the data from the active table on the screen, then the Drop Hidden feature removes the data from the table. The Sort feature is used to sort data by column heading. The Re-sort feature uses the same configuration as when the last sort was run, so the column headings do not need to be changed. Both of these features are needed to put data in ascending or descending order and for moving the data to the top of the table or hiding the unwanted data. The Query option may be used to find out what data exist in the data source. A simple example would be to find out if a certain kind of data is available for a well in a particular county operated by a certain company. Select the well name, formation age and operator and click on the Explore button. A table appears indicating how much of this data that meets this criteria is in the database. The other available features are to query the downloaded data set, query and replace and limit to map extent. The query-by-downloaded data limits the data to the table that is active in the window. The query-and-replace goes back to the original data source and brings the data into the table based on the query attributes. The limit query to map extent bounds the query to data contained in the AOI. Query may also be initiated from the Data Source panel button. Queries may also be initiated for data in the data source having no coordinates. This is very useful feature for accessing production, cores and hard copy data.

Once a table is available there is a capability to Drill Down into a second table. For example, the database may contain the well name at one level of detail and the type of well log traces at another. Much of what appears in the table at different levels will depend on the business views of the data that the data source provides. The pull-down menu will list the table(s) in the next level down.

Under the View pull-down menu there are several additional important options: Columns, Joins, Annotation, Charting, and Polygon Colors and Icons.

Column enables users to pick which columns they want displayed in the table on the screen. This is a quick way to eliminate unwanted data. Once invoked, the command will trigger a window showing two parallel lists that are labeled Not Displayed and Displayed. The displayed list initially shows all columns in the data source. The user makes use of a series of buttons (Add, Remove, To Top, To Bottom, Move Up, Move Down) that are displayed between the two lists. The buttons allow the user to select and organize the columns that need to appear on the Text screen (i.e., active or inactive sources). User confirms the choices by clicking Okay or exit with no changes by clicking Cancel.

Annotation is used by the user to annotate in the map view objects (wells, 3-D survey, 2-D lines) with the values in the column, such as well number or name for example. The screen is small and it contains two radio buttons (No annotation, Annotate with...), one pull-down list with the name of each column and two buttons (Cancel and Okay).

Joins provides the user the facilities to create Text tables that combine data from multiple data sources. These data sources need to have some common thread (or common key) so that the join operation can be performed. The window displays on top the data source that may have common elements/values with the one being examined. Below the name there are two lists: (i) the one in the left contains the column names for the current table and (ii) the one in the right contains the name of columns in the data source that have common element/values. Under each list there is a button name Edit that prompts a new screen Joins/Edit where the user selects what column is part of the join operation (from each data source). Once the edit activities are completed the user chooses one of the radio buttons: Link Tables or Merge data. If Merge data is chosen screen also asks if the user wants to Drop Rows With No Match. This window also contains two buttons (Cancel and Execute) and one pull-down menu (Help). The Joins Edit window is invoked by using the Edit button menu in the Join window. It is used by the user to select the columns to be displayed as part of the Joins. It includes (i) two parallel lists titled Non Keys (in the left) and Keys. The list initially shows the columns in the respective list. The user makes use of a series of buttons (Add, Remove, To Top, To Bottom, Move Up, Move Down) that are displayed between the two lists. The buttons allow the user to select and organize the columns that are part of the list of Keys columns. These columns are the ones to be used for the joins and (ii) two buttons (Cancel and Okay).

Charting is used by the user to develop charts based on the data selected in the Text screen. It contains (i) four radio buttons (No charting, Histogram, Pie Chart-Inter Row, Pie Chart-Intra Row). The user uses this buttons to chose the type of chart. Below the radio buttons, the screen displays two parallel lists titled Non Charted (in the left) and Charted. The list initially shows all columns in the left list. The user makes use of a series of buttons (Add, Remove, To Top, To Bottom, Move Up, Move Down) that are displayed between the two lists. The buttons allow the user to select and organize the columns that are part of the list of columns to be charted, (ii) two buttons (Cancel and Okay), (iii) one pull-down menu: Help and (iv) one box to enter the value to be used for Max Pixel Size.

Polygon Color and Icons. This option is under development.

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In support of the process of requesting data, GeoTrek provides the user a series of additional facilities described below. The facilities were designed to support the three tasks associated with requesting data; (i) selecting/bounding the desired data - the selection process, (ii) evaluating the data chosen, and (iii) to create the request email message that informs data vendors of the user's interest.

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The Requesting Process

Forms are triggered automatically by specific user actions, and are not invoked directly by user requests. They are typically the continuation of actions started during the creation of a graphical object on the map panel and at times they make use of information shown in text tables. For example, if the user decides to create a request seismic data, using the Seismic Blocks menu button, GeoTrek will generate automatically a form that the user fills out and then that form is emailed to the respective data owner. For requesting well data from a commercial vendor the process involves selecting the wells of interest on the map or a table and then requesting the specific data.

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Evaluating the Data

To evaluate the data before requesting it, the user should use the Info button on the Map View Panel. Each data set will return different supporting information to help the user assess the value of a particular data set. Figure 1 in The Map View Panel displays what each data set returns when the Info button is used.

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Requesting E-mail Message

For seismic and well log data an email form is provided automatically with the user's and the owner email information. Once the form is completed the email is sent.

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Under the Help pull-down menu there are three options: On this window, User Guide, and About GeoTrek. On This Window accesses on-line documentation that describes the basic functions and features available in the window being displayed. The User Guide accesses on-line documentation (Html pages) organized along three main topics: A Business Perspective, User Guide and Tutorial. About the Browser displays information about the GeoTrek browser copyrights and other information.

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