Lithological Data Builder

Lithological Data Builder (LDBuilder) is rule-based classification system for standardizing heterogeneous terms for the same rock type. The system standardizes lithological descriptions of subsurface data by comparing individual data elements in a table with a standardized vocabulary based on two classification systems. These classification systems; Geological Survey of Canada (GSC) and British Columbia (BC) use different but consistent rules in deriving individual subsurface materials. These rules are applied to each data entity to classify subsurface material by giving them meaningful geological categories. This process identifies each data element as a discrete geological material with a defined set category that can be modeled easily.

Classification systems are essential to create sufficiently limited number of geological units such that resulting data can be used in GIS (Schuurman 2002). Most subsurface modeling applications require discrete and defined geological units for analysis. This requirement makes it impossible to use unclassified datasets in most subsurface modeling. Well-log data standardization alone reduces the number of categories and terms by eliminating misspellings, variations in spelling and multiple descriptors but does not resolve data heterogeneity (Schuurman 2002) .