Cambridge, MA - April 1, 2004 - MetaCarta®, Inc., a leading provider of geographic intelligence, announces that the Air Force Office of Special Investigations has recently bought its geographic technology solution.
Founded in 1999, MetaCarta provides groundbreaking technology that integrates geographic information and unstructured data to enable better decisions. MetaCarta’s flagship product, MetaCarta Geographic Text Serch™ (GTS), boosts productivity by reducing the number of person-hours involved in searching, sorting, and reading large volumes of documents, using the universal language of geography as the base.
The Air Force Office of Special Investigations (AFOSI) has been the Air Force's major investigative service since Aug.1, 1948. It reports to the Inspector General, Office of the Secretary of the Air Force. The command focuses on four priorities:
- Detect and provide early warning of worldwide threats to the Air Force;
- Identify and resolve crime impacting Air Force readiness or good order and discipline;
- Combat threats to Air Force information systems and technologies;
- Defeat and deter fraud in the acquisition of Air Force prioritized weapons systems.
AFOSI will integrate MetaCarta’s Geographic Text Search capability with their Threat And Local Observation Notice (TALON) system. This will provide analysts with a geospatial representation of potential or suspected terrorist activities relative to critical national infrastructure – without the need for field agents to determine and document specific latitude and longitude coordinates. AFOSI’s TALON system is the foundation for the U.S. Air Force’s Eagle Eyes, defensive antiterrorism program. More information about this program is available at http://public.afosi.amc.af.mil/eagle.
“We are honored to be part of the Air Force Office Of Special Investigations' arsenal of tools," said John Frank, CEO of MetaCarta. "We are focused on delivering valuable solutions in support of mission critical customer needs."
MetaCarta GTS uses natural language processing to identify implied and explicit references to geographic locations within documents. The solution marks documents with appropriate latitude and longitude coordinates, and then enables a search for marked documents through a Graphical User Interface (GUI). Users search for documents using a combination of geographic location and keywords. Documents appear as icons on a digital map. The location of each document icon coincides with the geographic locations mentioned within the document. To locate documents relative to a specific location, MetaCarta GTS renders a map appropriately speckled with icons representing every document that includes text pertaining to the identified location. By clicking on a document icon, a user gains direct access to the original document in its entirety. This greatly improves productivity.
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.