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Ongoing growth in the volume of raw data generated by digitized oil and gas operations has been widely documented (Spath, 2014). What may be less apparent is that the industry is also authoring dramatically more unstructured content--interpretations, learnings, case studies, etc.--on an annual basis. This is not surprising, as anecdotal evidence suggests that most decisions are taken on the basis of unstructured data (Quaadgras & Beath, 2011) (Garland, 2017) (Palkowsky, 2005) (Haines, Shaughnessy, & Briggs, 2006) (Hollingsworth & Schey, 2017). At the Society of Petroleum Engineers, the number of new papers published annually has followed an exponential growth curve that doubles approximately every 10-11 years, beginning as far back as the early 1950's. Beyond books, journals, and conference papers available through the OnePetro digital library, SPE content comprises articles from print (the Journal of Petroleum Technology), digital-only publications (Oil and Gas Facilities, The Way Ahead and HSE Now), a variety of general-interest web pages, and technical resources (PetroWiki and SPE Connect). Well over 200,000 distinct items--papers or web pages--are available through the SPE's web sites as of May 2018. For oil and gas professionals looking for information from SPE content, the growing volume of information and diversity of sources has made it increasingly hard to find the relevant content quickly.
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