It would be an understatement to say we are overwhelmed by data. The technology to acquire tidal waves of data is upon us: seismic, well logging, production monitoring, microseismic, time-lapse seismic, environmental elements, plus the layers of "meta-data" that accompany each data type. We are literally struggling to catch up, let alone keep pace. I don’t know of anyone who has demonstrated the kind of unequivocal mastery over all their data necessary to make it perform, dynamically, on demand, the elegantly choreographed, integrated dance we have in our imagination. Loose ends, incomplete systems, human error, false correlations, misleading biases, broken connections, bottlenecks, sampling gaps, communication failure, and much more are the truly messy reality.
