News from the Underground

Here are the highlights from the past week.

Less than one month until Transform 2021 – The Software Underground’s T21 virtual conference is less than a month away, so it’s time to register and schedule your life during 16 – 23 April, 2021. Check out the calendar of events and make sure that you are tuned into the #t21-general channel.

SWUNG Hackathon Inside Transform – T21 kicks off with the Hackathon 16 – 18 April, but momentum from those projects will likely carry on, gathering eyeballs and contributors throughout the rest of the conference as well. In the #t21-hackathon channel, Filippo shared some instructions for proposing and discussing any would-be hackathon projects on this GitHub Discussion page.

git for you – One month in advance of his tutorial on git and GitHub at T21, Thursday 22 April, Steve has set up a Q & A in slido. Talk about a tutorial that is truly in service of others! It also means that you can might still get your questions answered if you, say, get pulled too deeply into a hackathon project.

Perils of improper sanitation – Are you aware of the perils of not sanitizing your inputs? This thread in #python has some nice links to explain what this is and when you should care.

Mapping partnerships – There are those that make maps, and there are those who want to make maps of those that make maps. This post is looking about how to structure a database to create a network of co-authorship of geoscience publications.

Probabilistically going to read it – I’ve got loads of love for those who put in the extra effort to make their work open access. Take for instance, this new publication that Júlio announced yesterday: Probabilistic Knowledge-based Characterization of Conceptual Geologic Models.

News from the Underground

Before jumping into the highlights from the Slack channels, just a reminder that the schedule is lining up for TRANSFORM 2021 conference in April. Go to the event page and register now!

Colour by numbers — There is a bit of art and a bit of science involved in making data visualizations — but it’s mostly science. For instance, this thread is an absolute showcase of pure helpfulness and enthusiasm about colouring a 2D array of numbers. Not always as easy as it sounds…

Scraping open the earth — A post about Pangaea, a data publishing service dealing with a variety of datasets in the earth and atmospheric sciences. Oh, and wanna loop through thousands of geospatial datasets in the inventory, Wesley’s got you covered.

Coordinate system correctness — Need to fix an erroneous coordinate reference system (CRS) in a shapefile? GeoPandas has got what you need.

Confused about type hints in Python? You’re not alone. There was a massive conversation about it this week on Swung. Conclusion: Yes.

Open all the wells — How many signatures will it take to open an entire country’s well data? No idea, but we might get to find out. A post was shared about a petition to the Dutch government to open all the well logs in the Netherlands. The petition, originating with one of the dGB founders, is still open.

Five star open data — Still on open data, is the post pointing to Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s Five Star Open Data plan. Some other frameworks, models, and concepts were discussed in this thread. What should Swung be doing to adopt, modify, or accelerate these initiatives?

What caught your eye on Software Underground this week? Let us know in the comments.

News from the Underground

Welcome to the news post! Here’s what’s hot this week in the Underground.

Just in time help — One of the hallmarks of the Underground is fast help with digital workflows. It easily beats Google for those occasions when you’re not even sure what to search for. On Monday, Mads asked how to get a horizon slice through a 3D seismic volume. Within minutes he had suggestions using the awesome segysak tool, or just xarray on its own, or pure SciPy.

How does your river flow? — Got an elevation model but it’s too low resolution for your watershed model? There were lots of good recommendations for software that may be helpful here. And don’t forget about the glorious geospatial tool that is QGIS — free and open source.

Unfolded Studio – Not to be confused with a room where structural geologists do palinspastic reconstruction, Justin Gosses posted a link to this new project from the folks at Uber who built kepler. If you’re into geospatial analytics, you need to see this, it looks beautiful.

The maestro of the meandering – Zoltan Sylvester’s 3D stratigraphic displays got a mention in the #viz channel. It’s worth checking out the README to his repo, it has plenty of the fluvial stratigraphic eye candy you’d expect from Zoltan.

Sedimentary logs as data — Sometimes data is locked away in Adobe Illustrator drawings. John Armitage asked about converting a pile of drawings of sedimentary logs into structured data, and got lots of suggestions. He eventually got striplog to work on most of the data. The power of Swung!

Contests and openness – Bobbing in the wake of the SPE contest we mentioned last week, Matt wrote an open letter to TGS about the licensing of the data and there was some chat about it on Slack. If you care about data science contests, community engagement, and how to maximize innovation and impact, give the post a read.

See anything else in the channels I may have missed? Leave a note in the comments.

News from the Underground

Hello! Welcome to the first of a series of (hopefully) regular round-ups and highlights from what’s happening in the Software Underground. We’ll cover announcements and cool events, plus anything we think is relevant, popular, or just cool.

The heart of the Software Underground is the Slack workspace. It’s so busy these days that it’s hard to catch everything, so we hope this round-up helps. True to the nature of geoscience, our selection criteria will be a mix of quantitative and qualitative. And as scientists, we’ll allow ourselves the freedom to improve our methods over time. Disagree with something? Tell us about it.

We’ve put links here that will take you directly to the messages in Slack. Just keep in mind that you’ll have to be logged into your account for those to work. If you’re not a member yet, sign up here — it’s free.

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SPE Data Analytics wireline log contest – An announcement was made about this new competition. The entrance fee, though small, was an initial surprise to some, but apparently the revenue will go toward SPE student scholarships. Another conversation surfaced on how tricky it is to evaluate the submissions in relatively niche contests such as these. The contest launches today, 15 January.

Jupyter Notebooks in Excel – Apparently there are two types of people in the subsurface world: those who use Excel, and those who are in Software Underground. LOL. Seriously though, a link about embedding Jupyter notebooks in Excel brought a mixture shock and horror.

Anaconda Navigator != conda – Confused about what Anaconda Navigator brings to the table? So are others in the community! Many of us prefer the command-line conda tool, but that comes with its own challenges, as discussed in this thread on teaching about environments. Do you use Navigator? Do you like it? Let us know what you think in the comments.

Connecting the dots – Creating linestrings from collection X and Y coordinates is straightforward if you know the sequence in which the dots are connected. If the points aren’t ordered, then the problem is more difficult. Some good discussions were bolstered by Leo Uieda’s gentle nudge, “We’d love to have this sort of thing in Verde if you’re keen on contributing.”

Wherefore art thou open data? – The need for open data came out of a member testing a seismic well-tie algorithm. Several folks pointed him toward a number of open data sets. A number of the usual suspects that come up again and again are: SEG wiki, F3, UK Oil and Gas Authority, and the Data Underground. The Data Underground is a Swung project, so you should definitely poke around and let us know what else might live there. Open Data. Yes please. Let’s have some more of that.

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The quality and speed of the knowledge sharing in the Software Underground is truly remarkable. Whether you’re asking questions, responding to others, or just sharing something that’s cool, we are all bettered by it. See you in Slack!