Geospatial (Tuesday) and Literacy, Culture & Human Factors (Wednesday)

The legislation that regulates recording and use of bathymetric data or information about the seabed has been updated and is not well known among some stakeholders. This presentation is primarily aimed at those who map bathymetric data or collect any type of information about the sea bed. The presentation will provide an overall introduction to the new regulation and what it entails, what type of mapping activity that requires an application or report, how the actors should relate to the legal framework and how to apply, how to get access to Kartverkets batymetric data, as well as a demo of our new digital application service. We belive this presentation will be useful for ensuring compliance with the regulation, while also contributing to safe and efficient development within the industry.

Data with geospatial context is the essential connective tissue linking subsurface and energy workflows, enabling efficient decision-making, operational efficiency, and supporting sustainability objectives. Despite its importance, handling geospatial data remains still one of the most complex elements within modern data ecosystems. When interoperability breaks down, the consequences may be rather silent but far-reaching, affecting data quality, workflows, and data platforms - including OSDU - and ultimately compromising the effectiveness of analytics and AI outcomes.

This presentation delves into the causes and failure points behind these geospatial interoperability challenges. Using seismic position data and metadata as an example, current data workflows - including data quality considerations - will be examined, along with their impact on diverse stakeholders, ranging from data and solution architects to end-users reliant on the data.

Attendees will gain insight into risks within geospatial workflows. Additionally, strategies to prevent the compromise of AI-driven insights, along with practical approaches to ensure data integrity, interoperability, and readiness for analytics, decision-making, and sustainable operations, will also be discussed.

Two years ago, at this conference, the argument was made that file format compliance remains indispensable even in the era of AI – that the foundation of reliable automation is a reliable benchmark. This argument holds, and we are beginning to see the tangible benefits of automation in data loading and QC.

Compliant and regularised subsurface data enables automated file identification and ingestion, systematic geodetic parameter validation, repeatable QC procedures, structured error reporting, and export to common exchange formats – all without manual intervention. The data lifecycle becomes more manageable, and each dataset is assigned an integrity indicator so that informed decisions are made. This process is established and in practical use today.

In this talk, we present practical experience of operating such workflows, examining both what is working and where the boundaries remain. Non-compliant data continues to present genuine challenges: CRSs that must be inferred when not explicitly declared, input files in formats that resist automation, poor quality scanned legacy data, and fundamental errors embedded invisibly within otherwise plausible datasets. In each of these cases, human expertise remains critical – and likely will for some time.

At these boundaries, there are feasible approaches to reduce the triage burden when data loading. Probabilistic, fuzzy CRS identification uses spatial and contextual clues to arrive at a reasoned prediction of positioning. Pattern recognition can identify fields within non-compliant files, and format fingerprinting can inform and refine future loading decisions.

Each improvement introduced into the automation workflow reduces the load on the analyst, allowing expertise to be directed toward genuine ambiguity rather than routine compliance checks. We explore the current industry state, emerging developments, and the challenges that still require solving before full automation can be achieved.

A growing number of maritime industries, including offshore wind, seabed mineral exploration, fisheries, and petroleum, are increasing the demand for high-quality geospatial data.

At the sime time, data silos remain a persistent barrier in both public and private sector, limiting the efficient use of geospatial information by restricting access, creating duplication of effort and reducing the ability to integrate data across maritime domains.

This presentation explores the underlying reasons these challenges remain, with particular emphasis on the gap between technical solutions and their implementation - and demonstrates how improved data sharing can unlock significant collective value across sectors.

Drawing on experiences from public geospatial data management in Norway, and informed by the author’s role as Marine Geodata Coordinator at the Norwegian Mapping Authority, this presentation highlights how clear roles, governance structures, and a national spatial data infrastructure have played a key role in breaking down data silos and enabling cross-sector data integration.

We argue that collaborative and governance-related factors, including data ownership, incentives and trust often is more critical than the enabling technology itself.

In Collaborative Well Planning (CWP), data delivery speed is often assumed to be an integration challenge. In practice, the dominant constraint is human behaviour under time pressure: last minute data submissions, informal handovers and unclear ownership that undermine trust and traceability. These behaviours routinely stretch data preparation from hours into days—and carry forward into downstream workflows. This presentation describes how a shift towards small, user prepared data packages reduced CWP data delivery from 1.5 days to as little as 1.5 minutes, without adding heavyweight process or central bottlenecks. The change was enabled by empowering users to take control of their data and thus bypassing the formal data preparation and readiness checks that were needed to ensure successful well planning sessions. The human dimension is at the core of this, and why users disengage with the prescribed methods, even though they are straightforward and simple. By designing data workflows around real behaviour—rather than perceived ideal behaviour—governed data packages become an enabler of speed and not an obstacle.