MetaCarta


MetaCarta is a private company that provides geographic information extraction and search engine products. The company was founded in 2001, and was acquired by Nokia in 2010. Nokia subsequently spun out the enterprise products division and the MetaCarta brand to Qbase. Their headquarters are in Reston, Virginia, with additional offices located in Springfield, Ohio.

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 Technology. In 1999, he received $500,000 from DARPA after developing a search technology which enables finding references to locations in documents and thus allowed documents to be retrieved from a search index when a geographical keyword is entered. MetaCarta also received funding from In-Q-Tel, a CIA-related organization, as well as over $18 million in private venture capital.

Acquisition

MetaCarta was acquired by Nokia on April 9, 2010. Nokia kept MetaCarta's core engineering team to build the search engine behind its location search offering, and spun-out the enterprise products division and MetaCarta brand to Qbase Holdings, LLC in July, 2010.

Products and services

MetaCarta offers two main products. The first, Geographic Text Search, combines keyword and geographic searches. The second, GeoSearch News, indexes news stories by location so that users can search by locations or use a map to see any news stories that have occurred in a given area.

MetaCarta Labs

In addition to its commercial products, MetaCarta maintains MetaCarta Labs, a lab website, which offers a number of unofficial projects. Through Metacarta Labs, the company has funded development of several open source geographic software packages.

Projects funded by MetaCarta