Geographic Text Search: Accelerating Analysis and Reporting

When: 
Thursday, October 16, 2003 - 7:00pm
Room: 
AI Lab
Lecturer(s): 
John Frank, MetaCarta

John Frank will describe MetaCarta's natural language geoparsing and geosearch, which accelerate the discovery of information about places. Imagine viewing a map of your building and finding documents plotted at the locations discussed in the documents. John will discuss statistical natural language geoparsing and database joins between text and geography.

MetaCarta's geoparsing handles non-U.S. locations, linguistic references, facilities, customer-specific locations, postal addresses, and coordinate transforms. This focus on geography allows MetaCarta Geographic Text Search to support commercial activities that require intense reading.

MetaCarta's Web Service APIs plot documents in mapping applications like ESRI's ArcGIS and integrated solutions from partners like Raytheon. Example applications include petroleum production, intelligence analysis, regulatory filing, real estate investing, environmental monitoring, natural resource management, facilities management, law enforcement, public records search, and issue tracking.

The talk is open to the public. After the meeting there will be an own-pay dinner, possibly with the speaker, at a nearby restaurant. Directions to the restaurant will be given at the meeting.

Lecturer Biography: 

John Frank founded MetaCarta in 1999 and is President and CTO. John has a bachelor degree in physics from Yale, and attended MIT as a physics doctoral student before taking a leave to found MetaCarta. John is a Hertz Fellow. MetaCarta was initially funded by DARPA and is an In-Q-Tel portfolio company. The company was nominated by Esther Dyson as a leading computer innovator at the "Introducing the next generation of computer revolutionaries" passing the torch event at the Museum of Science last spring.