Kansas Geological Survey, Open-file Report 2001-14
2000 Digital Petroleum Atlas Annual Report

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Year 4: Results and Discussion

Web Structure

A goal of the Digital Petroleum Atlas (DPA) is to provide users flexible access to the original data and intermediate steps of the study. Results of field studies are fed immediately into the databases. The flexibility of the Web provides access to the data that went into the study at the same time as the results.

To support these technical goals, a design was created for the web site. Several models were drawn up, but the goals were very simple:

1. Display information assembled
2. Allow user to choose path and goals
3. Don’t let user get lost.
4. Allow for efficient updating

As the DPA was constructed, there were two obvious "paths" through the digital data. The user could move geographically through several scales of data:

At each geographic scale, the user would be presented with choices and answers.

1. For this county, which field would you like to see?
2. What is the structure of the Morrow in the basin?
3. For this Field, which well are you interested in?
4. For which Play is this field an analog?

As an alternative the DPA could be structured around topical areas. For the DPA the topical areas were broken into following categories:

Regional General Geology

Geophysics Reservoir Wells

For each field, basin and county, information was structured in terms of both geographic scale and topical area. These two general structural styles of information (pages based on geographical scale and pages based on topical area) result in a grid system. However, in practice this structure becomes rapidly unmanageable. While it would be nice to simultaneously compare the geologic maps of three or four fields (isopach or structure), it is not possible and not desirable to have links from each geology page to every other geology page. As a result, for the DPA we emphasized movement among geographic scales, and worked to maximize the visitor’s ability to move from County to Field to Well. Movement between topical areas is limited to within the selected geographic scale (e.g., figures 1, 2).