Greenbelt, Maryland -- May 30, 1995 -- Empress Software Inc., developer and marketer of the EMPRESS Relational Database Management System (RDBMS) and 4GL, has become a member of the Petrotechnical Open Software Corporation (POSC). POSC is the independent organization working to develop standardized data formats, database systems and computing tools for the exploration and production (E&P) segment of the international petroleum industry.
POSC was founded in 1990 by five of the world's largest petroleum companies: BP Exploration, Chevron Corporation, Elf Aquitaine, Mobil Oil and Texaco. Membership today includes over 90 companies, government agencies and academic institutions around the world interested in helping to improve the flow of E&P data across company and disciplinary boundaries. The move to a cost-saving "buy vs. build" approach to software acquisition and the growing need for international cooperation in exploration and production helped fuel the need for standards-based solutions that led to the creation of POSC. The organization has already published specifications for a software integration platform, proved its concept with development of a reference dataset, and developed a set of standard interfaces between petrotechnical applications, database management systems, workstations, and users.
Because of its strategic relationships and experience in the European petrotechnical industry, Empress France is co-leading the company's involvement in POSC and its participation in the POSC Industry Pilot Project (IPP), in which software vendors and developers are demonstrating the ability to migrate their products to a POSC-compliant environment.
The focus of Empress France and Empress Software is to develop a supplemental library as an interface for the object-oriented layer that sits between a POSC-compliant application and the relational database defined in the POSC software integration platform. The core of this platform is the Exploration/Production Integration Center, or "Epicentre." Epicentre is both the industry data model and the computer architecture by which shared technical data are presented and made accessible. The POSC specification calls for objects in Epicentre to be used directly in application-generated queries and for the interface to be independent of hardware, operating systems and database management systems. Plus, a POSC-compliant solution must be scaleable from desktop computer systems up to the largest supercomputers.
"EMPRESS has long been used in environments where users need transparent access from within different applications to information stored in different databases on different platforms," said Empress Software President John Kornatowski. "We're excited to be participating in a project to demonstrate the ability of EMPRESS to adhere to POSC specifications and to provide a fully object-compliant product with the needed functionality to users in the petrotechnical industry."
Empress has developed the world's most advanced RDBMS, 4GL and GUI Builder with features such as ANSI standard SQL, a "C" callable RDBMS kernel, a full function report writer and 4GL application generator. Offering advanced functionality, including object-oriented capabilities and multimedia datatypes, EMPRESS delivers high performance applications that can be prototyped, developed and executed in local or distributed mode with true location independence. With its user-defined functions, the EMPRESS GUI Builder stores and displays binary data using Motif with mouse support.
EMPRESS was designed in Toronto by John Kornatowski and Ivor Ladd. Applications developed with EMPRESS include mapping, weather forecasting, voice messaging, multimedia, image processing, medical systems and CAD/CAM, as well as traditional RDBMS and 4GL solutions. Empress' Sales and Marketing offices are in the Washington, D.C., suburb of Greenbelt, Maryland, and in San Jose, California. Toronto, Canada, is the site of the company's Research and Development Center as well as International Sales and Marketing.
For more information, contact Empress Software Inc., 6401 Golden Triangle Drive, Suite 220, Greenbelt, MD 20770. Call 301-220-1919. Fax 301-220-1997. For international inquiries, call 905-513-8888. International fax 905-513-1668. In France (14 rue Rouget de l'isle, 92441 Issy-les-moulineaux), call 33-1-4108-4351. Fax 33-1-4108-4776.