By John Vandermay, Chief Technology Officer, Seequent
The next decade of innovation in the subsurface will depend on how well we can move not just data — but its meaning — between people, tools, and ideas.
Every decision in mining, civil infrastructure, environmental management, and energy projects depends on understanding the ground beneath us. Yet much of that understanding is trapped in closed formats, siloed systems, and workflows that can’t keep up with modern data science or the next generation of AI-assisted workflows.
At Seequent, we believe the future of geoscience will be shaped by the openness of data, platforms, and collaboration.
Why openness matters now
Geoprofessionals are innovators who embrace change but their working environment is ever more complex
Geoprofessionals have always been innovators. From hand-drawn cross-sections to the first 3D geological models, each generation has advanced new methods and tools to better understand the underground.
But progress has introduced complexity. Each new discipline — geology, geophysics, geotechnical, and environmental — developed its own data formats, standards, and software. These tools were brilliant at what they did individually, but they were rarely designed to work together.
That approach is no longer sustainable. Today, resources are deeper and harder to reach. Infrastructure projects are larger and more complex. Budgets are tighter. Environmental and community expectations are higher. Every project must deliver more insight, more certainty, and more value, often with fewer people, less time, and increasingly complex data. At the same time, the volume and diversity of subsurface information have grown exponentially, from drillhole and geophysical data to geotechnical, groundwater, and environmental monitoring data.
Much of this data remains fragmented across incompatible systems. Each time it moves between tools, valuable scientific context is lost, and opportunities for faster, smarter decisions are buried along with it.
We often hear the same question from customers: ‘We invest to acquire, clean, and store this data, so why should a vendor’s format determine what we can do with it?’
For decades, proprietary formats have dictated how data could be used, limiting innovation, slowing collaboration, and locking valuable insight inside single-vendor ecosystems.
Openness changes that.
When the geoscience context, not a proprietary file, becomes the unit of value, data becomes portable, queryable, and reusable across your workflows.
How Seequent is building an open foundation
Evo makes subsurface data accessible
Source: Seequent
Seequent’s geoscience data and compute platform, Evo, brings together subsurface data from any source and makes it accessible through open interfaces, open data models, and secure, powerful cloud services.
By embedding geoscientific meaning directly within open data schemas, Evo ensures that information carries its full context wherever it goes. That context makes the data intelligible not just to people and software, but to AI systems that can now interpret, validate, and even extend geoscientific understanding. Evo also makes Seequent’s compute capabilities accessible via APIs, giving users and partners the ability to build new applications, automate analyses, and power innovation directly from the platform.
In practice, openness with Seequent Evo means:
- 1. Open by interface: RESTful APIs based on open standards are documented and available to any authorised customer, partner, or AI coding assistant at developer.seequent.com.
- 2. Open by model: Geoscience objects with open-source data schemas, published in Seequent’s public GitHub repository, capture the scientific context of the data they represent, the relationships, parameters, and lineage that define geological, geophysical, or geochemical phenomena.
- 3. Open by design: Application-agnostic workflows allow data to move seamlessly between Seequent, Bentley, and third-party systems, because no single vendor should define how your subsurface data is used.
Importantly, openness does not mean open data. Customer data in Evo is never public, shared, or open-source.
What’s open are the schemas, the data structures, and standards that define how information is described and exchanged. Your proprietary data remains governed by Seequent’s enterprise-grade security frameworks, access controls, and audit trails.
Collaboration through community
Seequent has invested deeply in creating an open foundation for the geoscience community that extends beyond the technology to:
Open-source development
Open source refers to software or data whose underlying code and structure are publicly available for anyone to view, use, modify, and distribute. This openness encourages transparency, collaboration, and shared innovation.
Seequent engineers actively contribute to and maintain open geoscience data schemas, inviting collaboration from academia, industry, and software developers through our public GitHub repositories.
For our customers, the benefit is freedom. By open-sourcing these schemas, users of Evo and its APIs can advance their own geoscience innovations without waiting for software vendors to support a new file type or build a new interface. As AI coding assistants become more accessible, creating custom software connections is faster and easier than ever.
Evo users can now design end-to-end workflows that connect data collection, QA/QC, processing, modelling, and interpretation, linking previously separate applications without modifying the software itself. This creates a lossless data journey where information retains its full context and value at every step.
In short, open-source schemas free geoscience data from application boundaries and unlock its intrinsic value, giving organisations the flexibility to innovate on their own timelines.
Industry alignment
We are partnering with leading software providers, including Deswik, to ensure these schemas and APIs remain relevant and widely adopted.
Community and governance
The open schema community operates with transparent contribution processes and community-elected governance, ensuring shared ownership and continual improvement. We envision these schemas forming the backbone of an industry-wide standard for representing and exchanging geoscience data.
Developer enablement
Through developer.seequent.com, we provide documentation, testing environments, and examples to help developers build their own integrations and extensions.
Openness in action
The impact of openness is already clear in the field.
One mining organisation recently automated its short-term modelling workflow using Evo’s open APIs and schemas. What once required weeks of manual coordination now executes in a single day, integrating business systems, the block model API, and open block model schemas to trigger automated updates, ease collaboration, and generate reports on the fly.
That’s not just efficiency. That’s how openness turns data into real-time insight.
Enabling the next wave of innovation
Seequent is building the workflows of tomorrow
For Seequent, openness is not a feature — it is the architecture that connects legacy strengths to future innovation. It’s how we intend to make sure every dataset, model, and insight created today remains useful in the workflows of tomorrow.
The geoscience community faces an inflection point: experienced professionals are retiring faster than they can be replaced, while AI and automation are reshaping how we capture and interpret data.
For this transition to be productive and ethical, data must be freed from proprietary silos. Open schemas and accessible APIs enable both humans and AI systems to engage directly and responsibly with subsurface information.
Through Seequent Labs, our internal research and development group, we’re already exploring how open, transparent data models can drive generative design, predictive modelling, and automated decision support. These breakthroughs depend on the same open architecture that underpins Evo.
A call to the geoscience community
The next century’s greatest challenges, from resource security to climate resilience, will be solved underground. Meeting them requires not just better tools, but a new philosophy of collaboration. That’s why at Seequent, we’re building the open foundation for that future.
We invite the global geoscience community — developers, researchers, and innovators — to join us. Explore our open repositories, test Evo APIs, and help shape the next generation of subsurface understanding.