Data Standard¶
Oil records can be very complex – oil itself is made from 1000s of different compounds, and has multiple physical properties that are relevant to oil spills. In addition, many of the assays used for oil are developed with production of refined products in mind – these may not be the same data that are most relevant for oil spill response and fate analysis an modeling.
Oil also changes when exposed to the environment (weathering), and its properties change as it does so. While there are methods to model that process, there are inevitable uncertainties, so measuring the properties of weathered (Or simulated weathered) oil can also be very helpful.
Finally, spill response is complicated by the fact that we often don’t have a sample nor time to do complete analysis before we need to answer response questions. But some information is better than nothing, so we may choose to work with incomplete records.
As a result, the system needs to be very flexible – there are only very few fields that are strictly required, and many fields where there may be zero or more entries. We also can’t know what data may be available and useful in the future, so the schema must be easy to extend.