In the past, research institutions have acquired a lot of geophysical data that have not been made available either commercially or to the research community itself. This is often due to the fact that data have not been recovered from old media and therefore only rarely have they been reprocessed using current technologies. The reasons for this reside primarily in the limited economic resources of research institutions and therefore they have had to rely mainly on the isolated work of individual researchers to reprocess these data. To address these issues, OGS created a work group (DIAM-PROS) devoted to the recovery, reprocessing and dissemination of vintage geophysical data that finances itself through recovery and reprocessing projects done in collaboration with commercial companies.
A great quantity of old tapes have been recovered to a safe storage system whilst a large number of printed paper seismic sections have been digitized and restored to actual digital SEGY seismic data and stored on the same system. Metadata (ISO19115, O&M and SensorML) have been compiled so that the data can be indexed and discovered or browsed. A specific web based system has been designed and implemented that allows users to discover and interactively preview those geophysical data, such as seismic data, that previously were difficult, or impossible, to access.
Once this large amount of data was made available, several reprocessing projects were initiated, focusing on the major areas of interests both from a commercial and scientific standpoint.
