Seamless translation of modern file formats to SEG-Y through the file system interface

Abstract

SEG-Y is the de-facto exchange and archiving data file format used by the oil and gas industries. Sadly, it has failed to keep up with improvements made in the last decades in storage technologies, which includes compression algorithms for scientific data, parallel data storage and retrieval, spatial indexing, and portable metadata interfaces. Although replacements for SEG-Y do exist, the majority of geophysical software continues to rely on that file format. This paper presents an alternative self-describing container format for geophysical data and a translation layer based on the file system interface which enables unmodified legacy programs to benefit from this new format.