MetaCarta
has teamed with Group 1 in a strategic partnership and reselling agreement
that leverages address geocoding technology.MetaCarta's Geographic Text
search (GTS) technology will search text documents for geographic name
and place references and, using its proprietary statistical, natural language
parser, scans documents to identify and distill this information so that
it can be accurately represented on a map.The map acts as a visualization
tool to see the locations where these text references occur.Randy Ridley
of MetaCarta says, "lots of data are 'geolocated' by postal address.Group
1 Software helps with this application where street addresses are noted."
In this way, MetaCarta now has the ability to search unstructured text
for geographic references, in addition to detecting street address locations
where those details are given.
Mr.Ridley sees particular applications in law enforcement and homeland security.Police detective work is simplified as key documents, news clippings, or web-based information are scanned for associations that are not only time consuming to complete, but would not take it to a level to be able to "connect the dots." Here, MetaCarta's GTS excels in capturing and visualizing both in the proper context."By incorporating Group 1's technology within the GTS solution, end-users can rank documents by location from a given point," said a recent press release.
Customers such as the U.S.
Air Force Office of Special Investigations (AFSOI) are using MetaCarta
in their efforts to thwart terrorist threats to its informaiton systems
and worldwide operations, especially those related to critical infrastructure.
The combination of Group 1 technology along with its own solutions gives
MetaCarta added geopositioning accuracy and the ability to rank documents
by a given point.