Digging deeper into the WhiteStar Exploration Cube, what trends are you seeing nationwide in the oil patch?

There is a strong trend toward centralized data management for exploration using ArcGIS Server technology with SDE. Customers want to use data on a turnkey, nationwide basis limited only by their own creativity, not data availability.

Collaboration among departments sounds great, but doesn't the risk of data inconsistency increase dramatically when so many groups can edit existing data or contribute their own data layers?

Just because a collaborative tool exists doesn't mean that everyone in the department can go "hog wild." Trusted work flows must still exist in each department, however the benefit is that data can be compiled, changed, and edited parallel to the functions taking place simultaneously in other departments. Right now work flows are somewhat contingent upon each other and bottlenecks abound.

You've often made the point that free data usually costs more in the long run. Which free Internet data sets, in your experience, provide the least added value to oil and gas mapping projects?

The ones that cause the most trouble are the free/unmaintained land grid data sets of any sort. They don't edge-match evenly township-to-township or across river boundaries and state lines. Sometimes the data are incomplete, and often more than one version is floating around on the Internet making it extremely difficult to know you have the latest. Also, your project will not fit on any industry standard base.

What sorts of provisions should be included in data licensing agreements to make them more collaboration-friendly?

At the enterprise level, data should be sharable among different departments and even among different divisions, if so desired. Departments can also share the licensing and subscription costs. The nightmare scenario could mean that your Geology department licenses Texas data and the Land department licenses Oklahoma data from a vendor, only to discover they can't both be used legally to map projects spanning multiple states or counties. Our agreement can eliminate these sorts of problems.