For the first time, Spanish and Arabic documents can be made "location-aware" making that information available to be geographically categorized, visualized and mined. The new GDMs enable MetaCarta GeoTagger to automatically identify the language and character set of each document and assign latitude and longitude coordinates and country code tags to each place name in the document.  Customers in the public sector, media and publishing, and the energy industry can now discover, visualize, and act on important location-based information in English, Arabic and Spanish.

 “Location is becoming more important to all global businesses as well as to the intelligence community,” said David Sonnen, consultant at IDC for Spatial Information Management Research. “Location information isn’t always stored in databases but is found on the Internet, social media, and in other repositories. Global situations require that organizations be able to identify that data regardless of language.”

 MetaCarta GDMs are knowledge bases used by MetaCarta GeoTagger that enable the product to identify and disambiguate geographic references, and assign latitude and longitude coordinates. GDMs contain natural language processing (NLP) logic to recognize the jargons and data types that represent geographic entities, disambiguate names and establish geo-confidence. GeoTagger is a product that parses documents and identifies geographic references within the content. The geographic references are assigned latitude and longitude coordinates and country code tags in an XML file, which may be used as metadata and for processing by third-party systems.

 “While 85% of all unstructured content has some geographic reference, a huge amount of content is NOT in English,” said Claudine Bianchi, Vice President of Marketing for

MetaCarta. “It’s imperative that certain organizations be able to identify and understand the geographic references in content, no matter what language the content has been created in.  Arabic and Spanish are just the first languages we intend to support.”

 MetaCarta will be showcasing the new capabilities at ESRI International User Conference, BOOTH #915 at the San Diego Convention Center; San Diego, CA from  Tuesday, June 19, 2007 - Thursday, June 21, 2007.

 About MetaCarta

MetaCarta, Inc., is the leading provider of geographic search and referencing solutions. MetaCarta products make data and unstructured content “location-aware” making that information geographically relevant. Using a map interface, these innovative solutions make it possible for customers to discover, visualize, and act on important location-based information. Founded by a team of MIT researchers in 2001, MetaCarta is privately held, with US headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts and offices in Vienna, Virginia and Houston, Texas and resellers worldwide. For more information, please visit www.metacarta.com MetaCarta Resource Center.

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MetaCarta is a trademark of MetaCarta, Incorporated. All other product or corporate references may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies.