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Core MetaCarta technology is focused on two areas: geographic entity resolution and geographic information retrieval.
In geographic entity resolution, the key processes are:
- Step 0: Manual Tagging (the foundation)
- Step 1: Assessing Candidate Georeferences
- Step 2: Resolution
- Step 3: Search Relevance
In geographic information retrieval the key components are:
- GIR Relevance
- Speed Performance of GIR
Geographic Entity Resolution
Like other references in natural language text, geographic references are often under-specified and ambiguous. To take an extreme example, when encountering a reference to “Al Hamra”, the task is to determine to which of the 65 possible places in the world that name references, or even whether it is a place referenced, for the phrase also means “red” in Arabic. The same applies to the more than two dozen U.S. towns named “Madison”. In fact, the majority of references to places are ambiguous in this way.
Geographic Information Retrieval (GIR)
When geographic extraction is combined with information retrieval, as it is with MetaCarta GTS, two additional concepts become vital: relevance and performance. The success of any search solution, including geographic text search, is based on performance and accuracy.