The Dipmeter Advisor was an early expert system developed in the 1980s by Schlumberger with the help of artificial-intelligence workers at MIT[1] to aid in the analysis of data gathered during oil exploration.
The Advisor was generally not merely an inference engine and a knowledge base of ~90 rules, but generally was a full-fledged workstation, running on one of Xerox's 1100 Dolphin Lisp machines (or in general on Xerox's "1100 Series Scientific Information Processors" line) and written in INTERLISP-D, with a pattern recognition layer which in turn fed a GUI menu-driven interface.
It was developed by a number of people, including Reid G. Smith,[2] James D. Baker,[3] and Robert L.
[5] Unfortunately, this method had limited application in more complex geological environments outside the Gulf Coast, and the Dipmeter Advisor was primarily used within Schlumberger as a graphical display tool to assist interpretation by trained geoscientists, rather than as an AI tool for use by novice interpreters.
However, the tool pioneered a new approach to workstation-assisted graphical interpretation of geological information.