CAMBRIDGE, MA, Feb 04 (MARKET WIRE) --
MetaCarta(R), Inc., the leading provider of geographic search and
referencing solutions, today announced GeoTagger OnDemand, a hosted service for
digitalpublishers that identifies the places and points-of-interest mentioned in
text
documents, web pages and blogs, and relates them to their appropriate latitude
and longitude coordinates, which enables them to be automatically displayed
on maps, retrieved through a variety of search agents, or dynamically displayed
with other geographically relevant content. GeoTagger OnDemand is a
cost-effective fully hosted solution that is ideal for digital publishers who
want to geographically display or localize content without having to make a
big upfront investment. Hyper-localized content draws users back to the
publisher's site for repeat visits, substantially increasing user frequency
and page views metrics, enabling publishers to better capture advertising
dollars and maximize advertising rates.
YourStreet (located at www.yourstreet.com) is the first customer to use
GeoTagger OnDemand. YourStreet links news stories to places, and combines it
with
a neighborhood social network. The web site aggregates stories from 10,000+
newspapers, magazines, and local blogs and then displays them on a map. The
service is free. Once users are registered, they can begin "conversations"
about places in their area and connect with other neighbors who have signed up
for
the service and may live near them.
"YourStreet is transforming the way users experience local news by
indexingand mapping thousands of articles, blogs, and conversations down to the
street level. We scan thousands of newspaper sites and local blogs each
dayand use MetaCarta to help with location identification," explains James
Nicholson, CEO and founder at YourStreet.
GeoTagger OnDemand uses MetaCarta's proprietary natural language
processingand Geographic Data Module ("GDM") technology to indentify and
disambiguategeographic references and resolve the geographic meaning and
location intended by
the author. Based on MetaCarta's market leading geoparsing and geotagging
technology, GeoTagger OnDemand generates valuable geographic metadata from a
publisher's content, making it actionable by other applications and users.
Features include:
-- Retrieves Geographic Information from Content -- GeoTagger OnDemand
identifies the places mentioned in your content, in near real time, making
it easy for you to leverage the resulting geo-metadata to quickly localize
content.
-- Hosted Service -- GeoTagger OnDemand is a data & software-as-a-service
(DSaaS) model that offers rapid implementation and flexible scalability.
Additionally, customers do not need to install any hardware or software on
premises and there is no substantial up front investment.
-- Scalable -- GeoTagger OnDemand Service is charged on a transactional
basis, so the customer's expenses scale proportionally to the value
provided by the service.
-- Fast and Easy -- A full suite of APIs make it fast and easy for
GeoTagger OnDemand customers to integrate the geographic metadata with
their applications and web sites.
"One of the great values of our OnDemand service is that they make it
possible for us to rapidly deploy enhancements to both the logic and data that
are the underpinnings of our core technology. By hosting these services in our
data centers we are able to provide publishers with extremely rapid
deployment, and also implement changes in minimal time," said Rick Hutton, Vice
President of Content Services at MetaCarta.
GeoTagger OnDemand is available immediately.
About MetaCarta
MetaCarta, Inc., is the leading provider of geographic search and
referencing
solutions. MetaCarta products make data and unstructured content
"location-aware"
making that information geographically relevant. Using a map interface, these
innovative solutions make it possible for customers to discover, visualize,
and act on important location-based information. Founded by a team of MIT
researchers in
2001, MetaCarta is privately held, with US headquarters in Cambridge,
Massachusetts and offices in Vienna, Virginia and Houston, Texas and
resellers worldwide. For more information, please visit www.metacarta.com or
MetaCartaResource Center.
MetaCarta is a trademark of MetaCarta, Incorporated. All other product or
corporate references may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their
respective companies.
Contact:
Lisa Allocca
Red Javelin Communications, Inc.
978-470-2227
lisa@redjavelin.com
Copyright 2008, Market Wire, All rights reserved.
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