Washington, DC - September 14, 2005 - MetaCarta®, Inc., a leading provider of geographic-based business intelligence, announced today that its technology has been chosen to support a pilot effort that will integrate MetaCarta’s capabilities into the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's "Window to My Environment" (WME). The effort will be undertaken by Lockheed Martin Information Technology's National Environmental Information Systems Engineering Center (NEISEC). The integration of MetaCarta's unique technology will enable WME users to easily search and retrieve documents, reports, and other resources within a specific geographic region, reducing the time needed to find and analyze the most relevant results. Such capability will provide tremendous value to the EPA, private-sector individuals and the public at large, to analyze and visualize information based on geographic references within reports, briefings, presentations, permits and other text data from the EPA to increase the efficiency of creating actionable analyses for policymakers and other constituents.
WME is a web-based tool that provides the public with a wide range of federal, state and local environmental information on a particular geographic area of interest, through EPA's website. With the addition of MetaCarta technology, this application’s capability is expanded significantly, enabling greater depth of information that is also specific to the searcher's interest. It will first be tested by EPA internally, before being deployed for public access through the EPA website.
MetaCarta has developed a map-driven analytical and operational intelligence solution that bridges the gap between unstructured data and Geographic Information Systems (GIS). The product automatically identifies geographic references using advanced natural language processing (NLP) from any type of unstructured content in a customer’s archives such as email, web pages, newswires or cables. It assigns a latitude and longitude to these references so that users can analyze their text archives using geographic maps, keywords and time as filters. The results of a query are displayed on a map with icons representing the locations found in the natural language text of the documents and as a text results list. Both the icons and text summaries are hyperlinked to the documents they represent.
MetaCarta already has a successful track record of providing comprehensive analysis tools to many programs in the intelligence community and Department of Defense, and this agreement adds to those achievements. “MetaCarta is proud to offer Geographic Text Search to the EPA,” said Randy Ridley, MetaCarta’s Vice President and General Manager of Public Sector Systems. “Our technology enables an organization that has a significant amount of information where geography is relevant to rapidly search that information and retreive actionable intelligence. We are dedicated to helping the EPA and all public sector organizations use geographic intelligence more effectively."
About MetaCarta
MetaCarta, a leading provider of geographic intelligence, offers comprehensive analysis tools to enable better business decisions. Founded by a team of MIT researchers in 2001, MetaCarta provides groundbreaking technology that bridges the gap between Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and text search. The company presents innovative solutions that improve decision-making by making it possible for customers to place documents on a map. The company is privately held, with offices in Cambridge, MA, Vienna, VA, and Houston, TX. To learn more about MetaCarta, please visit www.metacarta.com.
MetaCarta is a trademark of MetaCarta, Incorporated. All other product or corporate references may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies.