Houston, TX - April 19, 2004 - MetaCarta®, Inc., a leading provider of geographic intelligence, announces the introduction of MetaCarta geOdrive, the geographic text search solution that helps upstream and downstream knowledge workers instantly locate the unstructured text documents they’re looking for and then places them on a map, according to their geographic relevance.
“Oil and gas companies depend on knowing as much as possible about geographic locations,” says Mike Odell, Vice President and General Manager, Energy of MetaCarta. “For example, workers need to know where to drill an exploratory well, where to place an offshore platform and where to locate a retail outlet. Geography is central to the operations.”
"Until now, the challenge for oil and gas workers has been to efficiently locate relevant documents. These documents come from a variety of sources, are created in many different text formats and most are not centrally indexed. So, when knowledge workers scan centralized indexes on Intranets, they often miss important documents,” Odell explains.
With MetaCarta geOdrive, geoscientists can efficiently and quickly locate text documents stored in a shared drive, the company Intranet or corporate portal by using such filters as geographic locations, keywords and time parameters. These documents are then organized on a GIS map according to the geographic references within them.
MetaCarta’s geOdrive uses a geoparsing engine to rapidly determine the spatial location of documents on maps. Additionally, MetaCarta has made a significant investment in its oil and gas sector gazetteer, which is an index of names and locations used to determine geographic relevance.
“Our gazetteer is one of the world’s largest and contains millions of names and locations. It includes publicly available, industry-specific names and locations, such as blocks, quadrants and leases within the Gulf of Mexico and North Sea, worldwide oil and gas fields and sedimentary basins,” Odell explains. “MetaCarta geOdrive also includes a mechanism to extend our gazetteer to include internal and proprietary names and locations to ensure effective searches within a given company.”
About MetaCarta
MetaCarta, a leading provider of geographic intelligence, offers comprehensive analysis tools to enable better business decisions. Founded by a team of MIT researchers in 2001, MetaCarta provides groundbreaking technology that bridges the gap between Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and text search. The company presents innovative solutions that improve decision-making by making it possible for customers to place documents on a map. The company is privately held, with offices in Cambridge, MA, Vienna, VA, and Houston, TX. To learn more about MetaCarta, please visit www.metacarta.com.
MetaCarta is a trademark of MetaCarta, Incorporated. All other product or corporate references may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies.