MetaCarta is a

software company A software company is a company whose primary products are various forms of software, software technology, distribution, and software product development. They make up the software industry. Types There are a number of different types of soft ...

that developed one of the first

search engine A search engine is a software system designed to carry out web searches. They search the World Wide Web in a systematic way for particular information specified in a textual web search query. The search results are generally presented in a ...

s to use a map to find unstructured

document A document is a written, drawn, presented, or memorialized representation of thought, often the manifestation of non-fictional, as well as fictional, content. The word originates from the Latin ''Documentum'', which denotes a "teaching" o ...

s. The product uses

natural language processing Natural language processing (NLP) is an interdisciplinary subfield of linguistics, computer science, and artificial intelligence concerned with the interactions between computers and human language, in particular how to program computers to proc ...

georeference Georeferencing means that the internal coordinate system of a map or aerial photo image can be related to a geographic coordinate system. The relevant coordinate transforms are typically stored within the image file (GeoPDF and GeoTIFF are example ...

text for customers in

defense Defense or defence may refer to: Tactical, martial, and political acts or groups * Defense (military), forces primarily intended for warfare * Civil defense, the organizing of civilians to deal with emergencies or enemy attacks * Defense indus ...

intelligence Intelligence has been defined in many ways: the capacity for abstraction, logic, understanding, self-awareness, learning, emotional knowledge, reasoning, planning, creativity, critical thinking, and problem-solving. More generally, it can ...

homeland security Homeland security is an American national security term for "the national effort to ensure a homeland that is safe, secure, and resilient against terrorism and other hazards where American interests, aspirations, and ways of life can thrive" t ...

law enforcement Law enforcement is the activity of some members of government who act in an organized manner to enforce the law by discovering, deterring, rehabilitating, or punishing people who violate the rules and norms governing that society. The term ...

oil and gas companies The petroleum industry, also known as the oil industry or the oil patch, includes the global processes of exploration, extraction, refining, transportation (often by oil tankers and pipelines), and marketing of petroleum products. The largest ...

, and

publishing Publishing is the activity of making information, literature, music, software and other content available to the public for sale or for free. Traditionally, the term refers to the creation and distribution of printed works, such as books, newsp ...

. The company was founded in 1999 and was acquired by Nokia in 2010. Nokia subsequently spun out the enterprise products division and the MetaCarta brand to Qbase, now renamed to Finch.

History

Financing

MetaCarta was founded in 1999 by John R. Frank while he was working on his Ph.D. in physics as a Hertz Fellow at the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of th ...

. By early 2001, John and Erik Rauch had developed a prototype of the Geographic Text Search product and incorporated the company together with Doug Brenhouse. In July 2001, they received $500,000 from

DARPA The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is a research and development agency of the United States Department of Defense responsible for the development of emerging technologies for use by the military. Originally known as the A ...

’s

Next Generation Internet Program The Next Generation Internet Program (also ''NGI'', ''NGI Initiative'') was a United States Government project intended to drastically increase the speed of the Internet. President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore announced their commitment t ...

. In 2001 and 2002, angel investors, including

Esther Dyson Esther Dyson (born 14 July 1951) is a Swiss-born American investor, journalist, author, commentator and philanthropist. She is the executive founder of Wellville, a nonprofit project focused on improving equitable wellbeing. Dyson is also an ang ...

, Bob Frankston,

David P. Reed David Patrick Reed (born January 31, 1952) is an American computer scientist, educated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, known for a number of significant contributions to computer networking and wireless communications networks. He w ...

and

Pattie Maes Pattie Maes (born 1961) is a professor in MIT's program in Media Arts and Sciences. She founded and directed the MIT Media Lab's Fluid Interfaces Group. Previously, she founded and ran the Software Agents group. She served for several years as ...

invested. In October 2002,

CIA The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA ), known informally as the Agency and historically as the Company, is a civilian foreign intelligence service of the federal government of the United States, officially tasked with gathering, processing, ...

’s venture capital arm

In-Q-Tel In-Q-Tel (IQT), formerly Peleus and In-Q-It, is an American not-for-profit venture capital firm based in Arlington, Virginia. It invests in high-tech companies to keep the Central Intelligence Agency, and other intelligence agencies, equipped with ...

invested and

Gilman Louie Gilman Louie (born 1960) is an American technology venture capitalist who got his start as a video game designer and then co-founded and ran the CIA venture capital fund In-Q-Tel. With his company Nexa Corporation he designed and developed multipl ...

, CEO of

, said "there is tremendous interest and value in this type of geospatial information service and MetaCarta is the first company in this space in which we have invested."

invested a second time in 2004. In December 2003, the company raised a $6.5M Series B from a

syndicate A syndicate is a self-organizing group of individuals, companies, corporations or entities formed to transact some specific business, to pursue or promote a shared interest. Etymology The word ''syndicate'' comes from the French word ''syndicat ...

led by Sevin Rosen. Sevin Rosen espoused an investment philosophy of frugality but required a controlling interest, and the decision to accept that investment has become the subject of a business school case study. Sevin Rosen’s cofounder Ben Rosen has historical ties to

, and had invested in Bob Frankston’s company VisiCorp in the late 1970s. The syndicate included the venture capital arm of Chevron Texaco. In 2005, the company raised a Series C of $10 million led by FA Tech. Between 2006 and 2009, one member of the Series B

went into

receivership In law, receivership is a situation in which an institution or enterprise is held by a receiver—a person "placed in the custodial responsibility for the property of others, including tangible and intangible assets and rights"—especially in c ...

and the

’s lead investor Sevin Rosen had an internal schism that eventually led it to split up. This forced the Sevin Rosen leader for the MetaCarta deal to depart.

Oil & Gas

In 2007, the company launched a product for the

energy sector The energy industry is the totality of all of the industries involved in the production and sale of energy, including fuel extraction, manufacturing, refining and distribution. Modern society consumes large amounts of fuel, and the energy indust ...

in partnership with IHS, and

Schlumberger Schlumberger Limited (), doing business as SLB, is an oilfield services company. Schlumberger has four principal executive offices located in Paris, Houston, London, and The Hague. Schlumberger is the world's largest offshore drilling comp ...

acquired exclusive distribution rights in the

petroleum industry The petroleum industry, also known as the oil industry or the oil patch, includes the global processes of exploration, extraction, refining, transportation (often by oil tankers and pipelines), and marketing of petroleum products. The larg ...

. The company partnered with content providers like the

Society of Petroleum Engineers The Society of Petroleum Engineers (SPE) is a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit professional organization whose stated mission is "to collect, disseminate, and exchange technical knowledge concerning the exploration, development and production of oil an ...

to support upstream (petroleum industry), upstream exploration use cases.

Acquisition

Nokia acquired MetaCarta on April 9, 2010, a few months after the company reported record revenue growth. Nokia kept MetaCarta's core engineering team to build the search engine behind its Here Technologies, HERE.com location search offering, and spun-out the enterprise products division and MetaCarta brand to Qbase Holdings in July, 2010. In 2012, John Frank left the role of Chief Architect for Search at Nokia to found Diffeo (company), Diffeo. Don Zereski, the CEO of MetaCarta at the time of its acquisition by Nokia became VP of Search and Discovery at Here Technologies, HERE and led acquisitions of other startups.

Products and services

MetaCarta offers multiple products based on its georeferencing and Geographic information retrieval, geoindexing technology, called CartaTrees. Its first product was an enterprise search tool that allowed users to combine keyword and map-based filters to retrieve documents. It was called Geographic Text Search (GTS) and was later renamed to Geographic Search and Referencing Platform (GSRP). The GTS was packaged as server appliance and used by enterprise customers that often cannot use cloud services, such as the British Transport Police for the 2012 Olympics. For oil & gas customers, the GTS was branded as "geOdrive". The company also offered Internet-based services built on its technology, including map displays of news stories filtered by location. Microsoft Vine, National Geographic, and other publishers have used these services. The company's georeferencing or geoparsing engine includes gazetteer databases of millions of place names in special knowledge domains, such as petroleum, and languages, including English, Arabic, and Spanish language, Spanish. The system uses machine learning to Ambiguity#Semantic and syntactic ambiguity, disambiguate the semantics of mentions of places in natural language text.

MetaCarta Labs

In addition to its commercial products, its lab website ''labs.metacarta.com'' launched a number of geoweb, neogeography, and open source software projects that gained notoriety through O'Reilly Media, O'Reilly’s Where 2.0 conferences, includin
Gutenkarte.org
TileCache, FeatureServer, and OpenLayers, now a project in Open Source Geospatial Foundation. MetaCarta Labs also showcased integrations with Silverlight, SharePoint, Flickr, Firefox, and a image rectification, map rectifier. Shortly before being acquired, MetaCarta granted the source code for its enterprise content crawler to the Apache Foundation to create th
Apache Manifold Connector Framework (ManifoldCF)

Awards

* 2006 - KMWorld's List of 100 Companies That Matter in Knowledge Management * 2005 - Red Herring (magazine), Red Herring Top Innovator * 2004 - Red Herring (magazine), Red Herring Top 100 Private Companies * IndustryWeek Technologies of the Year * 2-time KMWorld Trend-Setting Products

References

{{Reflist

External links

Company Web Site

Finch Computing
Companies based in Massachusetts Technology companies established in 1999 Technology companies of the United States 1999 establishments in Massachusetts