14.7.2 Seismic Representations

A seismic survey is an organization of seismic lines. For the context of RESQML, a seismic survey does not refer to any vertical dimension information, but only areally at shot point locations or common midpoint gathers. The seismic traces, if needed by reservoir models, are transferred in an industry standard format such as SEGY. The SEGY format contains information about the number of samples in the seismic traces and whether the vertical domain is in time or depth. This section only discusses the areal aspects of seismic surveys.

RESQML supports two basic kinds of seismic surveys:

• seismic lattice (organization of the traces for the 3D acquisition and processing phases).

• seismic line (organization of the traces for the 2D acquisition and processing phases).

Additionally, to transport several seismic surveys together:

• Seismic lattices can be aggregated into a seismic lattice set.

• Seismic lines can be aggregated into a seismic line set.

Thus there are four groupings of seismic surveys, which are represented in RESQML as follows:

• A seismic lattice is generally represented using a 2D grid representation.
• A seismic lattice set is represented using a set of 2D grid representations.
• A seismic line is generally represented using a polyline representation.

• The seismic line set is then represented by a set of polyline representations.

In RESQML seismic surveys are technical features that do not have multiple interpretations. Although it is possible to re-interpret a seismic survey for improved physical properties or for positioning, these types of relationships are not included within the RESQML knowledge hierarchy.