Imagine the power of turning locations in text documents into dots on a map. John Frank and Schuyler Erle from MetaCarta have been providing enterprise customers with that power for a number of years and are now ready to open up their georeference engine to the rest of the Internet. In this short and lively presentation from the 2006 O'Reilly Where 2.0 Conference, Frank and Erle discuss the development of their MetaCarta API and Trinity interface.
More geographic data is being created than ever before. In order to take advantage of this revolution, MetaCarta is allowing developers to geoparse plain text locations into mapped locations. MetaCarta has made an open source API available that makes this geoparsing possible in nearly any web application.
Erle, from the MetaCarta labs, presents a few possible applications of this technology. One such implementation allowed him to map all locations mentioned on the CNN homepage with varying degrees of emphasis. Another application let him visualize locations mentioned in texts available at Project Gutenberg, such as Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War.
John Frank founded MetaCarta in 1999 while beginning work on his Ph.D. in physics as a Hertz Fellow at MIT. While studying the microclimates of forests, Frank encountered a need for a new way to view collections of documents: geographically. Frank's vision and leadership have carried MetaCarta to its current position as the pioneer of geographic text search. At MetaCarta, he focuses on new technology explorations and partnerships. He speaks to technical audiences and advises on implementation strategies.
Schuyler Erle is a free software developer and activist. He is responsible for NoCatAuth, an early open source wireless captive portal, and geocoder.us, an open source U.S. address geocoder. Erle wrote O'Reilly's Mapping Hacks with Jo Walsh and Rich Gibson, and Google Map Hacks, also with Rich.
Presently, Erle works with MetaCarta in Cambridge, MA, USA, developing nitfy geographic projects like OpenLayers, an open source web mapping framework written in pure JavaScript, and Gutenkarte, a service for exploring the geographic dimension of classic works of literature. Erle is proud to be a founding member of the OSGeo Foundation.
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This free podcast is from our Where Conference series.
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