Geography rules
Let's say you live in Lynn, and you're telling someone where your house is. Depending on who you're talking to, you might describe it as near Boston, or on the North Shore, or in New England, or just around the corner from High Rock Park. You'd only occasionally give your exact address, and, unless you are an old salt, you probably wouldn't give your latitude and longitude.
How we describe location tends to vary more widely than, say, the way we describe the time or temperature. For that reason it presents a special challenge to digital search engines. How is a computer to figure out that "City of Lights" and "capital of France" refer to the city at the end of the Tour de France, while "Paris Hilton" does not?
A company called MetaCarta believes it has the solution. The Cambridge-based software firm, using so-called natural language processing technology, has designed a program that can scour databases for geographic references, both explicit and implicit, then organize the resulting documents as points on a map.
MetaCarta's initial funding came from the Pentagon, and US intelligence agencies have relied on the company's program in recent years to organize their raw intelligence. Now other organizations, both public and private, are getting interested. Oil companies have bought the technology, as have fire and rescue departments. The state of Arizona is using it as part of its border control efforts. Insurance companies are using it to spot fraud--finding out, for example, that a chiropractor lives only blocks away from both the victim and perpetrator in a series of purported accidents.
And, as MetaCarta vice president Claudine Bianchi points out, location is more than geography. While no such plans are in the works, the company's technology could, she offers, be used to map documents according to which part of the brain they refer to, or, for that matter, what part of the human genome. "Eighty-five or 90 percent of the data out there is unstructured," says Bianchi. "That's a lot of data." Putting it in its place is MetaCarta's mission.
