
28 February 2007, 2:21pm
MetaCarta®, Inc., geographic intelligence solutions, today announced support for KML (Keyhole Markup Language) for MetaCarta Geographic Text Search (GTS) and MetaCarta geOdrive. For the first time, companies and governments can now search unstructured text documents for geographic locations and visualize these references on a map using Google Earth, ESRI ArcGIS Explorer or NASA World Wind interfaces.
MetaCarta Geographic Text Search (GTS) automatically identifies geographic references using advanced natural language processing (NLP) in unstructured content found in RSS news feeds, Microsoft Office files, Adobe PDF, web sites (HTML) and text files. GTS assigns a latitude and longitude to these references so that users can visualize patterns on a map. This helps companies and government organizations to “connect-the-dots” visually.
KML is a file format used to display geographic data and imagery in a browser or user interface, such as Google Earth, ArcGIS Explorer and NASA World Wind. A KML file is processed in much the same way that HTML (and XML) files are processed by web browsers. Like HTML, KML has a tag-based structure with names and attributes used for specific display purposes.
“The advancements in standard interfaces for geographic information retrieval have been enabled new accessibility across a broader set of technologies and applications”, said Mark Smith, CEO and Executive Vice President of Research at Ventana Research, “MetaCarta is a key industry provider of technology that enables unstructured content to be location aware. By supporting KML, the MetaCarta solution can become more easily adopted by any organization.”
"MetaCarta continues to expand its geographic search capabilities to new markets," said Claudine Bianchi, vice president of marketing at MetaCarta. "With this announcement, we continue our strategy to be map-agnostic."
_new.gif)
Each month we select a hot topic and a leading figure in the industry to write about it.How valuable are our efforts on SDIs if we don’t actively address the human issues? Think about all the government regulations, technical implementation plans, internal processes and procedures, data sharing networks and so on. These are arguably meaningless if there is no buy-in or understanding from the people who must deliver against them.
During the 1Spatial Conference 2008 where there was a large number of presentations on a wide range of important industry topics ranging from data quality, data integration and data maintenance to open source and INSPIRE. But there were very few presentations that focused on the human aspects of our business.… More…
Steven Ramage
Contributor