MetaCarta

MetaCarta is a software company that developed one of the first search engines to use a map to find unstructured documents.[1][2][3][4] The product uses natural language processing to georeference text[5] for customers in defense,[6][7] intelligence,[8][9] homeland security,[10][11] law enforcement,[12] oil and gas companies,[13][14][15] and publishing.[16][17] The company was founded in 1999 and was acquired by Nokia in 2010.[18][19] Nokia subsequently spun out the enterprise products division and the MetaCarta brand to Qbase, now renamed to Finch.[20][21]

MetaCarta
TypePrivate
IndustrySoftware
Founded1999 (1999) in Cambridge, Massachusetts
Founders
FateAcquired in 2010 by Nokia who licensed the product and brand to Finch
Headquarters
Reston, Virginia
,
USA
Key people
Products
Websitewww.metacarta.com

History
MetaCarta GSRP flex-based UI circa 2012[22]
MetaCarta GSRP circa 2008[16]
MetaCarta GSRP circa 2008[16]
MetaCarta GSRP circa 2004.[9]
MetaCarta in ESRI ArcMap showing MGRS and other georefs[23][24]

Financing

MetaCarta was founded in 1999 by John R. Frank while he was working on his Ph.D. in physics as a Hertz Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.[25][1] By early 2001, John and Erik Rauch had developed a prototype of the Geographic Text Search product and incorporated the company together with Doug Brenhouse.[26][27] In July 2001, they received $500,000 from DARPA’s Next Generation Internet Program.[28][29][30] In 2001 and 2002, angel investors, including Esther Dyson, Bob Frankston, David P. Reed and Pattie Maes invested.[27][31][32][33][34]

In October 2002, CIA’s venture capital arm In-Q-Tel invested and Gilman Louie, CEO of In-Q-Tel, said "there is tremendous interest and value in this type of geospatial information service and MetaCarta is the first company in this space in which we have invested."[8][35] In-Q-Tel invested a second time in 2004.[36]

In December 2003, the company raised a $6.5M Series B from a syndicate led by Sevin Rosen.[37] Sevin Rosen espoused an investment philosophy of frugality but required a controlling interest,[38] and the decision to accept that investment has become the subject of a business school case study.[27] Sevin Rosen’s cofounder Ben Rosen has historical ties to Esther Dyson,[39] and had invested in Bob Frankston’s company VisiCorp in the late 1970s. The syndicate included the venture capital arm of Chevron Texaco.[37][40] In 2005, the company raised a Series C of $10 million led by FA Tech.[41][42][43] Between 2006 and 2009, one member of the Series B syndicate went into receivership[44] and the syndicate’s lead investor Sevin Rosen had an internal schism that eventually led it to split up.[45] This forced the Sevin Rosen leader for the MetaCarta deal to depart.[46][47]

Oil & Gas

In 2007, the company launched a product for the energy sector in partnership with IHS,[48][49] and Schlumberger acquired exclusive distribution rights in the petroleum industry.[13][50][15] The company partnered with content providers like the Society of Petroleum Engineers to support upstream exploration use cases.[51][52]

MetaCarta finding mentions of oil fields.[51]

Acquisition

Nokia acquired MetaCarta on April 9, 2010,[53] a few months after the company reported record revenue growth.[54] Nokia kept MetaCarta's core engineering team to build the search engine behind its HERE.com location search offering, and spun-out the enterprise products division and MetaCarta brand to Qbase Holdings in July, 2010.[55] In 2012, John Frank left the role of Chief Architect for Search at Nokia to found Diffeo.[56] Don Zereski, the CEO of MetaCarta at the time of its acquisition by Nokia became VP of Search and Discovery at HERE and led acquisitions of other startups.[57][58][59][60] Qbase re-launched MetaCarta as part of Synthos Technologies, now Finch, naming Erin-Michael Gill, CEO in September 2014.[61]

Products and services

MetaCarta offers multiple products based on its georeferencing and geoindexing technology, called CartaTrees.[62][63] Its first product was an enterprise search tool that allowed users to combine keyword and map-based filters to retrieve documents. It was called Geographic Text Search (GTS) and was later renamed to Geographic Search and Referencing Platform (GSRP).[64][65] The GTS was packaged as server appliance and used by enterprise customers that often cannot use cloud services, such as the British Transport Police for the 2012 Olympics.[12][22] For oil & gas customers, the GTS was branded as "geOdrive".[48][66]

The company also offered Internet-based services built on its technology, including map displays of news stories filtered by location.[67] Microsoft Vine,[68] National Geographic,[69][70][71] and other publishers[16] have used these services.

The company's georeferencing or geoparsing engine includes gazetteer databases of millions of place names[72] in special knowledge domains, such as petroleum,[51] and languages, including English, Arabic, and Spanish.[73][74][75] The system uses machine learning to disambiguate the semantics of mentions of places in natural language text.[76]

MetaCarta Labs

In addition to its commercial products, its lab website labs.metacarta.com launched a number of geoweb, neogeography, and open source software projects that gained notoriety through O'Reilly’s Where 2.0 conferences,[77][78][79][80] including Gutenkarte.org,[81] TileCache, FeatureServer, and OpenLayers, now a project in Open Source Geospatial Foundation. MetaCarta Labs also showcased integrations[82] with Silverlight, SharePoint, Flickr, Firefox, and a map rectifier.[83][84][85][86] Shortly before being acquired, MetaCarta granted the source code for its enterprise content crawler to the Apache Foundation to create the Apache Manifold Connector Framework (ManifoldCF)[87]

Awards

See also

References
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  2. "The revenge of geography". The Economist. 2003-03-13. Archived from the original on 2020-12-31.
  3. US granted 7117199, Frank, John R.; Rauch, Erik M. & Donoghue, Karen, "Spatially coding and displaying information", issued 2006-10-03
  4. Levy, Steven (2004-06-07). "Making the Ultimate Map - When digital geography teams up with wireless technology and the Web, the world takes on some new dimensions". Newsweek. Archived from the original on 2004-06-03.
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