WITSML is a standard for transmitting technical data between organisations in the petroleum industry. It continues to be developed by an Energistics facilitated Special Interest Group to develop XML standards for drilling, completions, and interventions data exchange. Organizations for which WITSML is targeted include energy companies, service companies, drilling contractors, application vendors and regulatory agencies. A modern drilling rig or offshore platform uses a diverse array of specialist contractors, each of whom need to communicate data to the oil company operating the rig, and to each other. Historically this was done with serial transfer of ASCII data. Purpose The drilling, completions, and interventions functions of the upstream oil and natural gas industry need universally available standards to facilitate the free flow of technical data across networks between oil companies, service companies, drilling contractors, application vendors and regulatory agencies. The WITSML initiative was started to address this need, and through its success, is now influencing petroleum industry data standards beyond the original scope. WITSML(tm) Standards support the “right time” seamless flow of drilling and completions data between data producers and data consumers to speed and enhance decision-making in the drilling and completions domain. The WITSML Special Interest Group (SIG) is open to all industry organizations who wish to contribute to the further development of the WITSML Standards. Energistics has custody of the standards and hosts the SIG. Energistics makes these and other industry standards available for use by all industry companies through a licensing agreement that is free of any fees or charges. Standards used WITSML Standards are defined using the W3C Internet standards for XML (notably XML Schema) and Web Services (including SOAP and WSDL)). The WITSML Standards define Web Services that define client/server interactions, known as the WITSML Application Programming Interface specifications. The WITSML Standards define more than 20 industry domain specific XML data object schemas to support drilling, completions, and intervention business functions. Download current standards Versions WITSML Version 1.3.1 was released in March 2006. This was superseded by Version 1.3.1.1(bugfix), release in March 2007. WITSML Version 1.4.1 was released in September 2011. WITSML Version 2.0 was released in February 2017. WITS and WITSML WITS was a precursor of WITSML based on serial data exchange on a "Point to Point" basis, developed in the early 1980s (SPE Paper 16141) and was transferred to the American Petroleum Institute as a standard. However the rapid evolution of network technology, and