MetaCarta, Inc., the leading provider of geographic search solutions, and GeoDecisions, an award-winning leader in the information technology industry that specializes in geospatial solutions, announced the integration of MetaCarta Geographic Text Search (GTS) into GeoDecisions IRRIS.
IRRIS is an enterprise Web portal used by U.S. military and homeland security agencies to support situational awareness, incident management, geospatial data integration and visibility, logistics, and command and control. For the first time, IRRIS portal users can find a significantly wider array of available information about a specific location, regardless of format or repository location. This opens the GIS portal to all-source information for more comprehensive situational awareness.
“A powerful aspect of MetaCarta GTS is its ability to put search into a geographic context, so the implementation of MetaCarta’s search functionality into IRRIS allows us to correlate textual reports of events with our geospatial data in a single application,” said a GIS manager supporting an organization charged with investigating criminal, terrorist, and espionage threats. “In turn, we uncover patterns and relationships that would otherwise be missed, and become more proactive in our analysis and reporting.”
MetaCarta Geographic Text Search (GTS) bridges the gap between GIS and text search by using natural language processing (NLP) to identify and search for geographic references within structured and unstructured documents such as live data feeds, reports, news feeds, and the vast WWW open-source environments. IRRIS is considered the U.S. Department of Defense premier baseline tool for coordinating transportation security and logistics worldwide through a common operating picture. It also supports planning, incident management, response, and recovery for U.S. state and federal agencies.
A customizable platform, IRRIS can easily integrate live and operational data, including infrastructure data, live-vehicle tracking, near-real time weather, and active route conditions, and display the information in a map format through a single, secure interface. The system draws transportation infrastructure information from more than 400 data sets, providing current data on roads, bridges, tunnels, road conditions, construction, or incidents. By integrating MetaCarta into IRRIS, users are able to easily find documents and Web pages that refer to a particular area of interest.
“Today’s search solutions can only find location-based information in structured databases. However there is a tremendous need, particularly for transportation security, to be able to find information as it relates to a particular location that is not contained in databases, but is referenced in reports, data feeds, or located on the Internet,” said John Donnelly III, vice president worldwide sales and field operations. “MetaCarta sifts through the mountains of information that is available but has not been accessible until now, and allows users to easily see that information as it relates to a particular place.”
“We are excited about the integration of MetaCarta’s geographic search engine into IRRIS,” stated Jon Pollack, vice president of advanced technologies for GeoDecisions. “With a single mouse click, IRRIS users can leverage the MetaCarta intelligent document search capability for any area mapped in IRRIS. The integration strengthens the IRRIS technology offering for many of our clients, allowing them to now add all-source information to their structured GIS database analysis that has not yet been mapped or added to the operational picture for analysis.”
Source: MetaCarta
