What is OSDU (Open Subsurface Data Universe)?

The energy industry sits on decades of subsurface data locked in proprietary formats, siloed applications, and vendor-specific platforms. Geoscientists and engineers spend up to 70% of their time searching for and preparing data instead of analysing it.

OSDU solves this by defining a common data model (schema) and set of APIs that all compliant platforms must support. Data loaded into an OSDU-compliant platform is automatically indexed, searchable, and accessible to any OSDU-compliant application - regardless of the original format or vendor.

Major operators (Shell, BP, Equinor, Chevron) and service companies (SLB, Halliburton) are adopting OSDU as the foundation for their digital transformation strategies. Cloud providers (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud) offer managed OSDU implementations.

OSDU is built on several key principles:

Common schemas: OSDU defines standard schemas for subsurface data types - wells, wellbores, seismic surveys, horizons, reservoirs, and more. These schemas use semantic annotations to define meaning, not just structure.

Data ecosystem: Data is ingested through standard APIs, stored in a cloud-native object store with rich metadata, and indexed for search. The platform handles format conversion, quality checks, and provenance tracking.

Open APIs: Applications interact with OSDU through standardised REST APIs - search, storage, workflow, and entitlements. This decouples applications from data, enabling a marketplace of interoperable tools.

Semantic layer: OSDU’s schemas are backed by semantic definitions that enable cross-domain queries. A geoscientist can search for “all wells in Block X with gamma-ray logs deeper than 3000m” without knowing which system originally stored the data.

Integrated subsurface workflows: A major operator deploys OSDU on Azure, migrating 40 years of well and seismic data from legacy systems. Geoscientists access all subsurface data through a single search interface for the first time.

Multi-operator data sharing: Partners in a joint venture use OSDU’s standard APIs to share subsurface data securely, eliminating months of manual data exchange and format conversion.

AI-ready data: An operator uses OSDU’s structured, semantically annotated data to train machine learning models for well placement optimisation, reducing the data preparation phase from months to weeks.