Monday, April 2. 2007

MetaCarta Launches Petroleum Geographic Search Portal for the Web

Now that we've all mastered basic Web searches and local Web searches it's time to go one better: a vertical geospatial Web search. And, who better to launch such a search portal than MetaCarta, the company behind the idea of geocoding Web (or other) documents based on geographic terms in the text. To create its first offering, called MetaCarta GeoIntel for Petroleum which enters beta today (press release), the company hired a content curator to select some 3000 key websites with information about the petroleum industry. The sites were indexed using the company's GDM and can be searched using both a geographic and topics term or terms. The results are listed and posted on a map. The services is free during the beta period which runs through summer; afterward existing MetaCarta users will pay a percentage of their existing license fee for access and new users will pay an annual fee.

Who will use the site? Existing users who want to query these online resources in addition to their inhouse databases, non-users who want such access to the Web data and analysts and business people in the petroleum industry. MetaCarta plans, and I think this is wise, to shop this heavily to the library community.

What's next? The thought is that in time this portal will grow with more indexed sites including, perhaps, some content that lies behind for fee firewalls. Other portals for areas such as insurance, real estate, emergency response may follow, depending on how this trial balloon plays out.

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