OGC Borehole Interoperability Experiment Engineering Report

This document reports on an exercise involving several government organizations, private companies, and academics trying to harmonize various representations of boreholes into acommon model. Boreholes are widely used in geoscience and engineering to probe and assess the underground, and all those communities (custodians, vendors, distributors, etc.) model this information differently. This heterogeneity becomes a problem when information from various sources needs to be aggregated. On the other hand, different communities use boreholes,therefore, different models are expected to address different use cases. This experiment looked at solutions to harmonize core aspects of boreholes while recognizing domain specific models. This exercise resulted in a tentative model, examples and recommendations for next steps. Those steps include the recommendation for OGC to support the creation of a Borehole Standards Working Group (SWG) to formalize the core borehole model (BoreholeML (BhML)) as anofficial standard. Future work should include expanding the scope of the draft borehole model presented here and co-ordinate with ongoing OGC Geoscience standards for geology and hydrogeology to ensure that those standards can operate together. It also includes working with existing standard custodians to produce BhML-compliant version of their existing borehole standards. Generic information describing the Borehole (who, how, when, etc.) and the other aspects that describe a Borehole (e.g. construction, monitoring, management areas, etc.) are required butwere excluded from this IE. Many of these are already summarized in pre-existing models. This semantic enrichment should be undertaken by a second Borehole IE or a SWG. This report includes several XML Instance Documents that conform to a draft BhML XML Schema. These are contained in the various ER Annexes as well as from the Borehole IE GitHub repository (https://github.com/opengeospatial/boreholeie/). Where appropriate, the report references the corresponding GitHub content.