MetaCarta
Where 2.0 Day Two is underway! First, a quick update on one of the presentations from yesterday.
Schuyler Erle and John Frank from MetaCarta demonstrated all of their company’s tools for integrating documents and maps. MetaCarta’s most flashy product is their Geographical Text Search tool, a “natural language text parsing engine” that can be used to identify location-based data inside documents. Feed some text into the search tool and it can identify place names in the text, then locate those places on a map.
The natural language search can also dig up contextual information about the specific places that your geographical search has returned.
So, once you have all of this geodata, what can you do with it? The MetaCarta Labs team stepped in to show us their ebeddable map widget called OpenLayers. It’s a JavaScript library that can be used to create a map of any region on any web page. The maps are OGC-compliant. The code is relatively lightweight — it uses a combination of Prototype.js and Rico for the heavy lifting — and the library is open source. OpenLayers looks promising for anyone who wants to add license-free maps to their site with a few lines of code.
Here’s a shot of the basic OpenLayers map widget (zoomed in on Sicily):
The last thing that MetaCarta showed off was a geographic text browser called Gutenkarta. You can plug any work of literature into Gutenkarta, and the browser will map locations mentioned in the text. The result is a map that you can consult while you read the book to see where specific events are happening. When you hover your mouse over points on the map, text citations and additional bits of information about that place are displayed.
Gutenkarta takes its name from Project Gutenberg, the free literature library. The demo, led by Schuyler, involved maps of works along the lines of War and Peace and The History of the Peloponnesian War.
