ENHANCING CORE DRILLING WORKFLOWS THROUGH ADVANCED VISUALIZATION TECHNOLOGY

We present the design and development of an initial visual core description tool with collaboration and annotation features for core drill expeditions. From real core drilling expedition deployments, we have observed how scientists make use of the tool and how the tool fits into modern core drilling workflows. Modern information technologies changes the way people work. New tools and equipments are being developed to help scientists to process huge amounts of data and to observe detailed phenomenon that they could not see before. The CoreWall Suite is a set of tools designed to aid real-time stratigraphic correlation, initial core description and data visualization for various core-drilling communities. Corelyzer is the initial visual core description tool in the CoreWall suite. Corelyzer allows scientists to collaborate over huge data visualizations on a desktop workstation using one or more monitors with great interactivity and scalability. The main software architecture has been developed using Java for the user interface and data source connection adapters, and OpenGL for efficient rendering.

= Scalability =

Corelyzer was designed to be scalable.

1. Data scalability

A level-of-detail (LOD) texture paging graphics system has implemented inside Corelyzer that allows scientists to load and interact smoothly with thousands of meters of geological cores, (one kilometer of core data produces roughly 30 GB of raw imagery.)

2. Visualization capability

Corelyzer supports hardware setups that range from a single screen laptop all the way up a six LCD panels on a single desktop workstation. The system handles the mapping between different high-resolution images to their physical scale properly. The main user interface provides major data visualization capabilities for core drilling, such as high-resolution core imagery, numerical core logging data, lithology diagrams, smear slides, thin sections and user generated freeform or structured annotations.

3. Software extensibility

The Corelyzer source code has been released under an open source license and using plain XML file formats. Anyone can take this code and make modifications to fit his or her needs. For example, with a simple exporter module, the Drilling Information System [DIS] can export core data along with core imagery to Corelyzer session file format and all data can be loaded into Corelyzer seamlessly. Corelyzer also provides a plug-in framework allowing third party developers to extend its functionalities and capabilities. For example, lithology diagram support was developed by Josh Reed, who is the IT manager of the Antarctica Drilling project. Moreover, for standardized core (meta) data distribution, a "core feed" plug-in was designed allowing users to subscribe to core data description feeds defined in the standard syndication format. Users can lookup feeds available and subscribe to interesting core data just like "Podcasts". The feed provides the metadata required to download and interpret actual imagery and numerical core log datasets.

= Deployment Usage =

The CoreWall prototype has been used since 2006 in the National Lacustrine Core Repository at the University of Minnesota and the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at the Columbia University. At the end of 2006 and 2007 Corelyzer was used in real core drilling expeditions during the Antarctica geological Drilling project. In 2006 season ANDRILL deployed with two CoreWall workstations with 30" LCD displays. They were mainly used in the following components of the workflow.

1. During night shift a CoreWall workstation was used side by side with the physical cores on the tabletop to help core description. The visualization capability that allows zooming into the high-resolution images beyond cores' physical scale while still maintaining details made the setup act like an electronic microscope for cores. This made it easier to do more accurate and detailed observations. For example, Dr. Franco Talarico from the University of Siena, Italy used to draw all of the core clasts on paper manually in order to do clast classification. Now with CoreWall, he can conduct research more efficiently with modern tools and techniques.

2. In the morning briefing, the other workstation was used for progress report explanations and core tours. This workstation was setup in a public discussion area in order to help people conducting context sensitive discussions around it.

While there were only two CoreWall workstation setups for the entire science team, all involved personnel were encouraged to install Corelyzer on their laptops so they could have access to related data easily. The comments from the scientists have being positive and in the 2007 season, ANDRILL increased the number of CoreWall workstations to six for the entire science team. One CoreWall was setup right at the drill site to help the drillers make in-time drilling decisions based on collected data.