Geographic business intelligence targets the enterprise

The geographic-search company MetaCarta, which was originally funded by the research arm of the Department of Defense and counts many customers in the government sector, is directing its technology at the enterprise.

Free IT resource Hear how top CIOs turn change into a competitive advantage. Sponsored by HP Free IT resource Try Sun servers, workstations and storage products free for 60-days. Sponsored by Sun Microsystems

This month, MetaCarta rolled out an enterprise feature set for its Geographic Intelligence System that organizes data geographically and lets users visualize geographic relationships between structured and unstructured data.

The idea is to let users search document repositories using a map as a filter, according to Claudine Bianchi, vice president of marketing at MetaCarta. The software uses natural-language search technology to go through unstructured text and identify latitude and longitude.

In corporations, "80 percent of unstructured data has some kind of geographic reference -- an address or something in the text referencing a location or a place like a monument," Bianchi said.

MetaCarta is targeting specific vertical industries where geographic information is a critical part of the business, such as oil and gas, utilities, education, environmental, insurance, and fraud detection.

For example, 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 that can be deployed separately or as a system. Geographic Text Search combines text and geographic search capabilities simultaneously for structured and unstructured content and displays the results on a map. GeoTagger provides XML metatagging of geographic entities to enable other systems to store, index, and display documents geographically. Finally, the Geographic Data Modules are a collection of place names and coordinates with relevancy values and natural-language processing based on industry, business, or topic, according to MetaCarta officials.

The new enterprise features include the addition of Active Directory calls in addition to the existing LDAP support, improved scalability, and integration with document management systems from Open Text and Documentum, now a part of EMC.