MetaCarta’s GTS
We first saw MetaCarta’s Geographic Text Search back in 2005. There must be some new functionality or something (document density map, maybe?), because the All Points Blog and others are covering it again. I’m jealous of MetaCarta’s effort more than its existence. It’s the sort of business that a library-based GIS might attend to (especially as more and more library faculty are ushered toward doing interdisciplinary research [with, say, computer scientists]) and it is the sort of project I would really like to develop as a module or other functional component of Purdue’s Institutional Repository project, wherein GIS isn’t analytical but rather an information application almost in and of itself. MetaCarta is using a map interface for non-map, non-GIS document clusters and we should all be interested (but librarians especially) in how these documents are ingested and indexed. If they can do automated geographic indexing of 10,000 documents per day, why don’t more libraries have map interfaces or at least some other geographic utility for locating materials?
