The Ultimate Guide to Data Cleaning and Ingestion

Revised and updated 2026 edition.

Data cleaning is fundamental to making data usable. Without it, analytics stall, projects slow down, and teams spend time managing files instead of answering the questions that matter for decisions and delivery.

Our revised 2026 edition of Ovation Data’s Ultimate Guide to Data Cleaning and Ingestion is written for data managers, digital transformation leads, and geoscience teams working with subsurface and operational data in the upstream oil and gas industry. It assumes familiarity with industry data types, but not with the details of Extract, Transform, and Load (ETL) implementation.

The guide brings together Ovation’s benchmark research and practical experience to clearly and methodically set out what good data cleaning looks like in real operational environments.

Inside the Guide, You Will Find:

A straightforward framework for approaching data cleaning projects, from initial audit through to ongoing management.
A detailed seven-step workflow covering GIS, seismic, well, and production data.
Practical guidance on handling legacy formats, metadata extraction, and quality control.
An explanation of how industry data models such as the Open Subsurface Data Universe (OSDU) and the Professional Petroleum Data Management (PPDM) model inform effective ETL design.
Clear criteria to help you assess potential data management partners and avoid common pitfalls.

The guide focuses on operational reality and draws on public benchmark datasets to demonstrate how workflows perform across real-world data types and formats.

If you are responsible for managing, cleaning, migrating, or preparing data for analysis, this guide provides a solid reference for what “good” looks like and what it takes to make data genuinely usable.

Download the revised 2026 edition to read the full guide.

Get in touch to find out how Ovation can help you to unlock your irreplaceable data.