Geographic Business Intelligence

The geographic-search company MetaCarta, which was originally funded by the Department of Defense and others in the government sector, is now directing its technology at businesses. MetaCarta introduced an enterprise feature for GIS that organizes data geographically and allows for visualization between structured and unstructured data. This allows the user to search database using a map as a filter. Claudine Bianchi, vice president of marketing at MetaCarta states that in corporations, 80% of unstructured data has a geographic reference; whether it is an exact location or any type of point of reference.

MetaCarta is targeting specific industries where geographic information is a critical part of the business, such as the critical infrastructures, educations, and fraud detection.

MetaCarta sites this example for its use in the business sector: “Before an oil company commits to spending millions of dollars to drill a new well, geographic intelligence could be used to comb silos of information about that specific location, illustrating on a map whether the area has been drilled previously, when the lease expires, and other relevant trends about the site.”

MetaCarta's GIS technology comprises three components:

Geographic Text Search - combines text and geographic search capabilities for structured and unstructured data that can then be displayed on a map

GeoTagger - provides XML metatagging of geographic sites so they can be stored, and indexed

Geographic Data Modules - a collection of places, names and coordinates with assigned significance values and natural-language processing based on business or topic