MetaCarta
Encyclopedia
MetaCarta is aprivate company providing geographic solutions since 2001. Their headquarters are in Cambridge, MA with additional offices located in Washington DC; Houston, TX; San Francisco, CA; Seattle, WA; and New York, NY.
. In 1999, he received $500,000 from DARPA after developing a search technology which enables finding references to locations in documents and thus documents can be retrieved when a geographical keyword is entered. MetaCarta also receives funding from In-Q-Tel
, a CIA-related organization.
, which offers a number of projects which are not official projects of the company. Through Metacarta Labs, they have funded development of several open source geographic software packages.
History
MetaCarta was founded by John R. Frank while he was working on his Ph.D. in physics as a Hertz Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyMassachusetts Institute of Technology
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a private research university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. MIT has five schools and one college, containing a total of 32 academic departments, with a strong emphasis on scientific and technological education and research.Founded in 1861 in...
. In 1999, he received $500,000 from DARPA after developing a search technology which enables finding references to locations in documents and thus documents can be retrieved when a geographical keyword is entered. MetaCarta also receives funding from In-Q-Tel
In-Q-Tel
In-Q-Tel of Arlington, Virginia, United States is a not-for-profit venture capital firm that invests in high-tech companies for the sole purpose of keeping the Central Intelligence Agency equipped with the latest in information technology in support of United States intelligence capability...
, a CIA-related organization.
Awards
- Red Herring magazine named MetaCarta as one of the top 100 innovators in 2004.
- KMWorld Magazine mentioned the company on its "KMWorld 100 Companies That Matter in Knowledge Management" list in 2006.
Products and services
- Geographic Text Search (GTS) - Combines keyword search with geographic search so that users can find content related to a place and view the results on a map.
- GeoSearch News (http://geosearch.metacarta.com/) - Geosearch engine that shows current news on a map. It indexes more than 1,400 national/international/local news sources and provides direct feeds from Associated Press and Reuters.
MetaCarta Labs
In addition to its commercial products, MetaCarta maintains the MetaCarta Labs lab websiteLab website
A lab website is a specific type of website most commonly dedicated to research and development programs.Relating to the classic scientific research environment - the laboratory - existing lab websites predominantly fall into two categories, the real-world and the virtual.-Real-world laboratory...
, which offers a number of projects which are not official projects of the company. Through Metacarta Labs, they have funded development of several open source geographic software packages.
Projects funded by MetaCarta
- OpenLayersOpenLayersOpenLayers is an open source JavaScript library for displaying map data in web browsers. It provides an API for building rich web-based geographic applications similar to Google Maps and Bing Maps...
(now a project in Open Source Geospatial FoundationOpen Source Geospatial FoundationThe Open Source Geospatial Foundation , is a non-profit non-governmental organization whose mission is to support and promote the collaborative development of open geospatial technologies and data. The foundation was formed in February 2006 to provide financial, organizational and legal support to...
) - TileCache
- FeatureServer
See also
- Erik RauchErik RauchErik Rauch was a biophysicist and theoretical ecologist who worked at NECSI, MIT, Santa Fe Institute, Yale University, Princeton University, and other institutions....
- Company Co-Founder (May 15, 1974-July 13, 2005) - Schuyler ErleSchuyler ErleSchuyler Erle is a free software developer and activist. He also works in the fields of digital cartography, wireless networking, intelligent search engines and the Semantic Web. He was the lead developer of which is an open source wireless captive portal...
- András KornaiAndras KornaiAndrás Kornai is a well-known mathematical linguist. He earned his mathematics PhD in 1983 from Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest where his advisor was Miklós Ajtai...
- Chief Scientist - Hertz FoundationHertz FoundationThe Fannie and John Hertz Foundation is an American non-profit organization that awards fellowships to Ph.D. students in the applied physical, biological and engineering sciences. It is considered to be the most competitive and prestigious graduate fellowship in science and engineering. The...
- Red Herring (magazine)Red Herring (magazine)Red Herring was a technology business magazine, which flourished during the dot com boom, with global distribution and bureaus in Bangalore, Beijing, and Paris. It also sponsored conferences designed to bring venture capitalists, entrepreneurs, and technologists together. But the magazine went into...