Simply put, MetaCarta provides a platform for information on places. They have compiled the world’s largest gazetteer or directory of location, with 24 million locations and growing, an order of magnitude more than The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency’s 3 to 4 million. Beyond just addresses, they include locations such as dams, lakes, and buildings and, unlike other gazetteers, they don’t stop at just coordinates, including additional information such as demographics to improve searches.
MetaCarta then leverages this extensive database in numerous ways. Their products apply geographic tags to documents, identifying the locations mentioned, matching the author’s intent with an average of above 90% certainty. Using statistical modeling, MetaCarta can determine that an article about Paris Hilton visiting Austin, Texas on her way to London is actually about Austin not Paris, France or England. This, in turn, allows for geographic search. In the booth, a display showed how a very generic search term flagged millions of places worldwide then, when the exhibitor zoomed in on Washington, DC, the results were reduced to the thousands. The searches are also smarter as they understand that neighborhoods are in towns, towns are in counties, and counties are in states so the same location may be referred to in multiple ways. MetaCarta can also both incorporate and be used in other software, allowing for many other possible applications.