MetaCarta Geographic Text Search
John Frank of MetaCarta followed David Rumsey on stage. MetaCarta sells technology to couple mapping with document search, providing geo-location for points of reference within text. Basically, if you want to know everything written by your company about a specific geographic region, MetaCarta can link your research documents to the locations they reference. This isn't particularly compelling from a consumer perspective yet, but if MetaCarta makes the technology publicly available we're sure to see their technology integrated with things like Wikipedia to create a Encyclopedia of Earth with geo-specific documentation that actually delivers relevant results. This is one area I'm particularly interested in because at the moment there are still errors in search where I get information about Des Moines, WA when I want details about Des Moines, IA. Bringing data to a more micro level, the MetaCarta technology makes it possible to find everything written about a specific part of Des Moines, rather than the massive dump of information delivered under current results on the city when performing a local search.
