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MetaCarta

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MetaCarta
Company typePrivate
IndustrySoftware
Founded1999; 25 years ago (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

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]

History

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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See also

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References

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  1. ^ a b Jennifer 8. Lee (2002-01-14). "Federal Agents Look to Adapt Private Technology". New York Times.{{cite news}}: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
  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.
  5. ^ "MetaCarta: Putting Natural Language on the Map". GIS Monitor. 2003-08-21. Archived from the original on 2003-10-03.
  6. ^ Schutzberg, Adena (2002-08-22). "Information Sharing & Homeland Security Symposium: On The Floor". Archived from the original on 2002-08-26.
  7. ^ Hardy, Michael (2004-03-07). "MetaCarta maps a new path". Federal Computer Week.
  8. ^ a b "MetaCarta secures funding from In-Q-Tel - Investment Highlights MetaCarta's Value to Government Market". In-Q-Tel. 2002-10-16.
  9. ^ a b Francica, Joe (2004-03-11). "MetaCarta, Inc. - Geographical Text Searching". Directions Magazine. Archived from the original on 2004-08-11.
  10. ^ Sarkar, Dibya (2005-03-15). "DHS to use MetaCarta". Federal Computer Week. Archived from the original on 2005-04-15.
  11. ^ Hermida, Alfred (2004-01-30). "Spooks turn to hi-tech geography". BBC News Online.
  12. ^ a b "British Transport Police Selects MetaCarta to provide Location-based Situational Awareness for 2012". GISuser.com. 2009-01-20.
  13. ^ a b "Schlumberger gets MetaCarta exclusive - Schlumberger has acquired exclusive distribution rights to the oil and gas sector for the MetaCarta map-based geographic information search technology". Offshore Magazine. 2007-12-18.
  14. ^ "Schlumberger Acquires Exclusive Distribution Rights to MetaCarta for Oil & Gas Sector". GPS World. 2007-12-17.
  15. ^ a b "Schlumberger Acquires Exclusive Distribution Rights to MetaCarta for Oil & Gas Sector - Agreement Provides Geographically Relevant Search Capabilities". Hart Energy. 2007-12-19.
  16. ^ a b c d Smith, Susan (2008-04-07). "MetaCarta Moves into Digital Publishing with GeoSearch News". GISWeekly.
  17. ^ "MetaCarta to Geo-Enable BBC". Geospatial World. 2008-12-11.
  18. ^ "Nokia acquires geographic information company MetaCarta". New York Times. 2010-04-09.
  19. ^ "Nokia Acquires MetaCarta". MetaCarta. Archived from the original on 2014-02-22. Retrieved 2014-02-09.
  20. ^ "Nokia Divests MetaCarta Inc While Retaining Geographic Intelligence Technology for Local Search Services" (Press release). Nokia Corporation. 2010-07-12.
  21. ^ "Qbase Holdings, LLC announces acquisition of MetaCarta Inc". MetaCarta. Archived from the original on 2014-02-22. Retrieved 2014-02-09.
  22. ^ a b "London 2012 Olympics: Mapping the Playing Field with Qbase's MetaCarta GSRP". Earth Imaging Journal. 2012-10-04. Retrieved 2020-12-30.
  23. ^ Ridley, Randy; Gross, John-Henry; Frank, John. Can Geography Rescue Text Search?. ESRI Users Conference. ESRI.
  24. ^ Ridley, Randy; Gross, John-Henry; Frank, John. Can Geography Rescue Text Search? (full article) (PDF). ESRI Users Conference. ESRI.
  25. ^ "Where 2.0 Conference Speaker – John R. Frank". O'Reilly. Retrieved 2008-05-16.
  26. ^ "Entity Details - File Number: 3340933 - Incorporation Date / Formation Date: 1/5/2001 - Entity Name: Metacarta, Incorporated". Retrieved 2020-12-30.
  27. ^ a b c Zacharakis, Andrew; Zinn, Brian (November 2012). "MetaCarta: Growing a Company, Do We Take the VC Money? - CASE-Reference no. BAB695C". Babson College.
  28. ^ High Speed Connectivity Consortium (March 2003). A Nationwide Experimental Multigigabit Network - AFRL-IF-RS-TR-2003-55 - Final Technical Report (PDF) (Report). Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. DARPA Order No. G147, J164. Archived (PDF) from the original on December 29, 2020.
  29. ^ USC Information Sciences Institute (July 2004). Research Networks and Technology Migration (RESNETSII) - AFRL-IF-RS-TR-2004-224 - Final Technical Report (Report). Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.1025.9829. DARPA Order No. J178, J804, J957.
  30. ^ "Data mining: Darpa bets". Institutional Investor. 2004-10-13.
  31. ^ "EDVenture - Ester Dyson's Board Seats & Investments". Retrieved 2020-12-31.
  32. ^ David P. Reed (2002-01-13). "Names and Places".
  33. ^ Dan Bricklin. "Boston Museum of Science Computing Revolutionaries event". Archived from the original on 2003-08-13.
  34. ^ Newell, Craig (2003-03-23). "Interview: Esther Dyson—Industry Visionary". PC Magazine. Archived from the original on 2003-12-04.
  35. ^ Glasner, Joanna (2003-03-25). "Who's Watching the Watch Lists?". Wired.
  36. ^ a b "MetaCarta lands second funding from CIA". Boston Business Journal. 2004-06-29. Retrieved 2008-05-16.
  37. ^ a b "MetaCarta maps out path to $6.5M in second round". Boston Business Journal. 2004-01-05.
  38. ^ Clarke, Peter (2004-07-28). "Sevin Rosen closes ninth fund with $300 million".
  39. ^ Dyson, Esther (October 13, 1997). "The Accidental 'Techie'". Newsweek. pp. 79–86.
  40. ^ "Chevron Technology backs MetaCarta - ChevronTexaco's venture capital arm is financing the GIS/text-based search engine". Oil IT. February 2004.
  41. ^ "MetaCarta Receives $10 Million". 2005-09-08. Archived from the original on 2017-07-11.
  42. ^ "MetaCarta lands $10M in Series C VC". Boston Business Journal. 8 September 2005. Retrieved 29 August 2013.
  43. ^ "MetaCarta Names George McNamee and Don Zereski to Board of Directors; Secures $10 Million in Series C Financing". 2005-09-08.
  44. ^ United States of America v. Chisholm SBIC, LP (US District Court for the Western District of Oklahoma 2009-06-02), Text.
  45. ^ Das, Anupreeta (2008-01-08). "Sevin Rosen venture capital partners splitting up". Reuters.
  46. ^ "Kevin Jacques, Partner, Palomar Ventures (2006)". Retrieved 2021-01-01.
  47. ^ "Form D". 2009-05-11.
  48. ^ a b "MetaCarta, IHS sign data agreement". Offshore Magazine. 2007-06-11.
  49. ^ "MetaCarta collaborates with IHS to enhance Energy Geographic Data Module". Geospatial World. 2007-06-12.
  50. ^ "MetaCarta 4.6 Now Available". Schlumberger. 2012-04-20.
  51. ^ a b c Palkowsky, Betsy (2005-03-07). "A new approach to Information Discovery" (PDF).
  52. ^ Palkowsky, Betsy (2005). "A New Approach to Information Discovery". All Days. Society of Petroleum Engineers. doi:10.2118/96771-MS.
  53. ^ Gonsalves, Antone (10 April 2010). "Nokia Acquires MetaCarta". InformationWeek. Retrieved 29 August 2013.
  54. ^ "MetaCarta Achieves Record Fourth-Quarter Revenue - Customer Growth Reflects Market Demand for Location Based Information" (Press release). 2010-02-02. Archived from the original on April 15, 2010.
  55. ^ "Nokia sells MetaCarta 3 months after acquisition". BusinessWeek. 12 July 2010. Archived from the original on July 15, 2010. Retrieved 29 August 2013.
  56. ^ "Speaker John Frank - From Text to Action with Collaborative Agents - HLTcon 2017". Basis Technology. 2017.
  57. ^ "Nokia Corporation Acquires Desti to Boost HERE Maps". 2014-05-31.
  58. ^ Lunden, Ingrid (2014-05-30). "Nokia Buys Desti To Add AI To HERE Maps, Will Shut App".
  59. ^ Zereski, Don (2014-04-15). Indexing the Real World-HERE, Nokia's Mapping Division, Tech Talk (Speech). Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
  60. ^ Lunden, Ingrid (2014-06-12). "Nokia's Here Buys Medio Systems To Push More Personalised Location Services".
  61. ^ LLC, Qbase. "Qbase Launches Synthos Technologies". www.prnewswire.com. Retrieved 2023-10-18.
  62. ^ "CartaTrees Map Search Text Index". Archived from the original on 2003-04-02.
  63. ^ Frank, John. Geographic Text Search: Accelerating Analysis and Reporting. Greater Boston Chapter of the ACM. MIT Artificial Intelligence Playroom. Archived from the original on 2003-10-08.
  64. ^ "MetaCarta Introduces New Geographic Search and Referencing Platform That Geo-Enables Content for Location-Based Applications" (Press release). 2008-09-29.
  65. ^ "MetaCarta Geographic Text Search (GTS) For Government Applications" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 22 February 2014. Retrieved 9 February 2014.
  66. ^ Hanten, John (2006-12-05). TOP Stories-Drilling And Production - Chevron Technology Ventures (Dec 05 2006).
  67. ^ Mills, Elinor (24 August 2008). "MetaCarta: Mapping the news". CNET. Retrieved 29 August 2013.
  68. ^ "MetaCarta Partners with Microsoft to Provide Local News to Microsoft Vine". 2009-05-04.
  69. ^ "National Geographic and MetaCarta Introduce CartaLens". EContent Magazine. 2007-10-26.
  70. ^ National Geographic Maps uses Meta Lens to Manage Digital Assets (PDF). ESRI Federal Users Conference. 2008.
  71. ^ "National Geographic and MetaCarta introduce CartaLens". Geospatial World. 2007-10-23.
  72. ^ Smith, Susan. "The Space Between Maps, Search and Content".
  73. ^ Dinan, Elizabeth (2003-11-10). "Ware-Withal: MIT-rooted MetaCarta stakes its claim with automatic geoparsing software".
  74. ^ "MetaCarta Unveils First Geo-referencing Solution to Support Arabic and Spanish Languages". 2007-06-20.
  75. ^ Frank, John; Warren, Bob. "Locating All Content" (PDF).
  76. ^ Rauch, Erik; Bukatin, Michael; Baker, Kenneth (2003). A confidence-based framework for disambiguating geographic terms (PDF). Proceedings of the HLT-NAACL 2003 workshop on Analysis of geographic references.
  77. ^ Statz, Pamela (2006-06-14). "MetaCarta". Wired. Archived from the original on 2020-12-31.
  78. ^ Parsons, Ed (2006-06-15). "Where 2.0 Day 2 – It's all about data."
  79. ^ Frank, John (2005-06-29). Local Search Faces Off - Craig Donato, Perry Evans, John Frank, Jeremy Kreitler, Shailesh Rao (Speech). Where 2.0. Archived from the original on 2013-07-29.
  80. ^ "Where2.0 - Metacarta". High Earth Orbit. 2006-06-13.
  81. ^ O'Reilly, Tim (2006-06-13). "Gutenkarte: Geo annotation of Gutenberg texts".
  82. ^ Schutzberg, Adena (2005-06-21). "MetaCarta -- A Big Idea". Directions Magazine.
  83. ^ "MetaCarta Labs". Archived from the original on 2013-05-17.
  84. ^ Schmidt, Chris (19 November 2019). "Github: Labs Rectifier". GitHub. MetaCarta Labs Rectifier - The MetaCarta Labs Rectifier is a Django-based server and OpenLayers-based client which allows you to upload maps, and transform them to match the real world.
  85. ^ Pawlowicz, Leszek. "Online Raster Map Georeferencing/Registration With Map Rectifier". Free Geography Tools.
  86. ^ "Metacarta Lab's Map Rectifier". 2006-10-08.
  87. ^ "Apache Manifold Connector Framework (ManifoldCF)". The original ManifoldCF code base was granted by MetaCarta, Inc., to the Apache Software Foundation in December 2009. The MetaCarta effort represented more than five years of successful development and testing in multiple, challenging enterprise environments.
  88. ^ "MetaCarta Selected for KMWorld's List of 100 Companies That Matter in Knowledge Management". 2006-03-06.
  89. ^ a b c d e "MetaCarta.com: Getotagging News". 2008-03-24.
  90. ^ "MetaCarta Press - News". Archived from the original on 2005-05-07. 21 Feb 2005 Red Herring -- The Tyranny of Location - 01 Feb 2005 Press Release: MetaCarta Named a Top 100 Innovator by Red Herring
  91. ^ "Red Herring 100 Winners". 2004. Archived from the original on 2004-07-27.
  92. ^ "MetaCarta". Archived from the original on 2004-09-27.
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