Surveying, Mapping and GIS

We have recently been working with MetaCarta- they provide search engine technology with a twist- as documents are ingested and indexed, the MetaCarta ingest engine also contextually extracts any geographic references and geocodes them- and then stores the geocoded locations with the other indexed data.

What this does is allow the search engine to do a number of additional things that ordinary search engines cannot: for instance restrict its search results to a bounding box or map window, and retrieve only the documents pertaining to that geographic extent- or you could plot the location of all the matching documents on a map as pushpins…

A nice feature of MetaCarta is that they have had the foresight to provide a Web Services interface to their appliance- this allows deep integration into existing applications by using SOAP calls to perform the query- it then is a simple matter to parse the XML response and retrieve the returned document titles, URLs, lat/longs, abstracts, or other parameters.

MetaCarta – http://www.metacarta.com/