MetaCarta Expands Geographic Information Retrieval

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."

Geo: International