The oil and gas industry is undergoing a digital transformation, and at the heart of it lies the crucial role of the landman. While the popular series "Landman" with Billy Bob Thornton primarily showcases the wild world of oil operations and wildcatting, the final episodes of season one offer a glimpse into the true work of a landman, exemplified by the character of **Cooper Norris**, Tommy's hardheaded son. We see Cooper immersed in courthouse records, meticulously piecing together a play, negotiating a 25% royalty with mineral owners, and strategically targeting the Wolfcamp shale in abandoned fields. This is the essence of land management – a complex interplay of title research, legal expertise, negotiation, and data analysis. In episode 9, Cooper is putting together a play against the Wolfcamp shale, and identifying the mineral tracts of abandoned wells and dead fields, mainly. He can be seen visiting a mineral (and surface) owner and negotiating an Oil and Gas Mineral Lease (OGML). ![[Landman-Cooper-Negotiates-OGML-Play.png]] **What Does a Landman Do?** A landman is the linchpin of any oil and gas exploration project. They are responsible for: - **Title Research:** Unraveling the complex history of land ownership (the "chain of title") to ensure clear and defensible mineral rights. - **Negotiation:** Securing leases and other agreements with landowners, balancing the interests of both parties. This is on full display when Cooper negotiates the OGML, a foundational document in oil and gas exploration. - **Contract Administration:** Meticulously managing lease agreements, ensuring compliance and accurate royalty payments. - **Due Diligence:** Conducting thorough investigations to assess risks and opportunities associated with potential acquisitions. - **Mapping and GIS:** Leveraging geospatial data to visualize and analyze land holdings. **The Challenge:** Traditional land management practices often rely on manual processes, paper-based records, and fragmented data sources. This can lead to inefficiencies, errors, and missed opportunities. **The Solution: An AI-Powered Landman Application with Oracle 23c, Cohere, and APEX 24.2** We're building a next-generation landman application that leverages the latest advancements in database technology and AI to streamline workflows, improve accuracy, and unlock new insights. Here's how: **1. Oracle Database 23c AI Vector Search:** - **Document Management:** We'll store all relevant documents (deeds, leases, assignments) within the Oracle database as BLOBs, with extracted text in CLOBs. This includes the crucial OGMLs that Cooper negotiates. - **Semantic Search:** Using the new AI Vector Search capabilities in Oracle 23c, we can perform semantic searches across these documents. This allows landmen to find conceptually related documents even if they don't contain the exact keywords, dramatically accelerating title research and due diligence. For example, they could quickly find all OGMLs with specific royalty clauses or covering particular depths. - **Runsheet and Chain of Title Automation:** By combining vector search with traditional SQL queries against structured data (like tract and owner information), we can automate the generation of Runsheets and Chains of Title. - **JSON Relational Duality:** Oracle 23c JSON Relational Duality Views allow us to access and manipulate both structured and unstructured (JSON) data through a single, unified view. This will greatly improve developer productivity. **2. Cohere AI for Enhanced Intelligence:** - **Information Extraction:** We'll integrate Cohere's powerful language models to extract key information from legal documents, such as grantor/grantee, effective dates, royalty rates, and specific clauses (e.g., Pugh clauses, depth limitations). This is particularly valuable for OGMLs, which contain a wealth of important terms. - **Contract Summarization:** Cohere can automatically generate concise summaries of complex legal documents, making it easier for landmen to quickly grasp the essential terms, just like Cooper needs to do when reviewing and negotiating OGMLs. - **Risk Assessment:** By analyzing historical data and legal documents, Cohere can help identify potential title defects, lease compliance issues, and other risks. - **OCI Gen AI:** We will use this service on Oracle Cloud to do fine-tuning, prompt engineering, and RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) which will enhance the accuracy and relevance of search results by combining vector search with generative AI. **3. APEX 24.2 for Rapid Application Development:** - **User-Friendly Interface:** The newly released APEX 24.2 provides a low-code environment to rapidly build a modern, intuitive user interface for the landman application. - **Interactive Reports:** APEX allows us to create interactive reports and dashboards that visualize key data, such as ownership breakdowns, lease expirations, and production trends. - **Workflow Automation:** APEX's built-in workflow capabilities can automate routine tasks, such as sending notifications, generating reports, and routing documents for approval. - **Mapping Integration:** We can easily integrate maps into the APEX application, allowing landmen to visualize land boundaries, well locations, and other spatial data. **4. Graph Database for Relationship Modeling:** - Oracle 23c's integrated property graph capabilities will allow us to model the complex relationships between tracts, owners, documents, and other entities. - This enables efficient Chain of Title traversal and allows landmen to quickly identify all documents related to a particular tract or owner. **The "Landman" Connection:** Our application will empower landmen to perform their jobs more efficiently and effectively, just like Cooper Norris in the later episodes of "Landman." They'll be able to: - **Quickly assemble a play:** By rapidly searching and analyzing title data, identifying open acreage, and negotiating leases with the aid of AI-powered insights, similar to Cooper's focused approach on the Wolfcamp shale. - **Target specific formations:** By integrating geological data and leveraging AI to identify promising areas. - **Minimize risk:** By automating due diligence processes and leveraging AI to identify potential title issues. **Diving Deeper into the Data Model:** This post provides a high-level overview of the application's architecture. But how does it all fit together at the data level? In my next blog post, "**[Unveiling the Data Model Behind Our AI-Powered Landman Application](LINK TO YOUR NEXT BLOG POST HERE)**," I'll dive deep into the intricacies of our data model. We'll explore: - **The Relational Core:** How we're structuring the essential land management entities (tracts, owners, leases, etc.) in a robust relational schema. - **JSON for Flexibility:** How we're using JSON Relational Duality Views to manage semi-structured data extracted from legal documents, including the all-important OGMLs. - **The Power of Graphs:** How the property graph connects entities and enables powerful relationship-based queries. - **Vectors for Semantic Understanding:** How we're leveraging AI Vector Search to enable semantic search and intelligent document retrieval. Stay tuned for a detailed look under the hood! **Conclusion:** This project showcases the transformative power of combining Oracle Database 23c's AI capabilities with Cohere's advanced language models and the rapid application development features of APEX 24.2. We are building a landman application that is not just a system of record but a strategic tool that empowers land professionals to make better decisions, faster. This is the future of land management, and it's being built today on Oracle Cloud!