MetaCarta

Company type	Private
Industry	Software
Founded	1999; 26 years ago (1999) inCambridge, Massachusetts
Founders	John R. Frank(CEO &CTO) Doug Brenhouse(COO &CFO) Erik Rauch
Fate	Acquired in 2010 byNokia who licensed the product and brand to Finch
Headquarters	Reston, Virginia , USA
Key people	Ron Matros(secondCEO) Don Zereski(thirdCEO) George C. McNamee András Kornai(Chief Scientist)
Products	geographic information retrieval OpenLayers
Website	www.metacarta.com

MetaCarta is asoftware company that developed one of the firstsearch engines to use a map to findunstructureddocuments.^[1][2][3][4] The product usesnatural language processing togeoreference text^[5] for customers indefense,^[6][7]intelligence,^[8][9]homeland security,^[10][11]law enforcement,^[12]oil and gas companies,^[13][14][15] andpublishing.^[16][17] The company was founded in 1999 and was acquired by Nokia in 2010.^[18][19] Nokia subsequently spun out the enterprise products division and the MetaCarta brand to Qbase, now renamed to Finch.^[20][21]

MetaCarta was founded in 1999 by John R. Frank while he was working on his Ph.D. in physics as aHertz Fellow at theMassachusetts Institute of Technology.^[22][1] By early 2001, John andErik Rauch had developed a prototype of the Geographic Text Search product and incorporated the company together with Doug Brenhouse.^[23][24] In July 2001, they received $500,000 fromDARPA’sNext Generation Internet Program.^[25][26][27] In 2001 and 2002, angel investors, includingEsther Dyson,Bob Frankston,David P. Reed andPattie Maes invested.^{[24][28][29][30][31]}

In October 2002,CIA’s venture capital armIn-Q-Tel invested andGilman Louie, CEO ofIn-Q-Tel, said "there is tremendous interest and value in this type of geospatial information service and MetaCarta is the first company in this space in which we have invested."^[8][32]In-Q-Tel invested a second time in 2004.^[33]

In December 2003, the company raised a $6.5M Series B from asyndicate led bySevin Rosen.^[34] Sevin Rosen espoused an investment philosophy of frugality but required a controlling interest,^[35] and the decision to accept that investment has become the subject of a business school case study.^[24]Sevin Rosen’s cofounderBen Rosen has historical ties toEsther Dyson,^[36] and had invested inBob Frankston’s companyVisiCorp in the late 1970s. The syndicate included the venture capital arm ofChevron Texaco.^[34][37] In 2005, the company raised a Series C of $10 million led by FA Tech.^[38][39][40] Between 2006 and 2009, one member of the Series Bsyndicate went intoreceivership^[41] and thesyndicate’s lead investorSevin Rosen had an internal schism that eventually led it to split up.^[42] This forced theSevin Rosen leader for the MetaCarta deal to depart.^[43][44]

In 2007, the company launched a product for theenergy sector in partnership withIHS,^[45][46] andSchlumberger acquired exclusive distribution rights in thepetroleum industry.^[13][47][15] The company partnered with content providers like theSociety of Petroleum Engineers to supportupstream exploration use cases.^[48][49]

Nokia acquired MetaCarta on April 9, 2010,^[50] a few months after the company reported record revenue growth.^[51] Nokia kept MetaCarta's core engineering team to build the search engine behind itsHERE.com location search offering, and spun-out the enterprise products division and MetaCarta brand to Qbase Holdings in July, 2010.^[52] In 2012, John Frank left the role of Chief Architect for Search atNokia to foundDiffeo.^[53] Don Zereski, the CEO of MetaCarta at the time of its acquisition byNokia became VP of Search and Discovery atHERE and led acquisitions of other startups.^{[54][55][56][57]} Qbase re-launched MetaCarta as part of Synthos Technologies, now Finch, namingErin-Michael Gill, CEO in September 2014.^[58]

MetaCarta offers multiple products based on itsgeoreferencing andgeoindexing technology, called CartaTrees.^[59][60] Its first product was anenterprise search tool that allowed users to combine keyword and map-based filters to retrieve documents. It was called Geographic Text Search (GTS) and was later renamed to Geographic Search and Referencing Platform (GSRP).^[61][62] The GTS was packaged asserver appliance and used by enterprise customers that often cannot usecloud services, such as theBritish Transport Police for the2012 Olympics.^[12][63] Foroil & gas customers, the GTS was branded as "geOdrive".^[45][64]

The company also offered Internet-based services built on its technology, including map displays of news stories filtered by location.^[65]Microsoft Vine,^[66]National Geographic,^[67][68][69] and other publishers^[16] have used these services.

The company'sgeoreferencing orgeoparsing engine includesgazetteer databases of millions ofplace names^[70] in special knowledge domains, such as petroleum,^[48] and languages, including English,Arabic, andSpanish.^[71][72][73] The system usesmachine learning todisambiguate the semantics of mentions of places innatural language text.^[74]

In addition to its commercial products, itslab websitelabs.metacarta.com launched a number ofgeoweb,neogeography, andopen source software projects that gained notoriety throughO'Reilly’s Where 2.0 conferences,^{[75][76][77][78]} includingGutenkarte.org,^[79] TileCache, FeatureServer, andOpenLayers, now a project inOpen Source Geospatial Foundation. MetaCarta Labs also showcased integrations^[80] withSilverlight,SharePoint,Flickr,Firefox, and amap rectifier.^{[81][82][83][84]} Shortly before being acquired, MetaCarta granted the source code for its enterprise content crawler to theApache Foundation to create theApache Manifold Connector Framework (ManifoldCF)^[85]

• 2006 - KMWorld's List of 100 Companies That Matter in Knowledge Management^[86][87]
• 2005 -Red Herring Top Innovator^[87][88]
• 2004 -Red Herring Top 100 Private Companies^{[89][33][87][90]}
• IndustryWeek Technologies of the Year^[87]
• 2-time KMWorld Trend-Setting Products^[87]

• Erik Rauch – company Co-Founder (May 15, 1974 – July 13, 2005)
• Schuyler Erle
• András Kornai – former Chief Scientist
• Hertz Foundation
• OpenLayers

• Company Web Site
• Finch Computing

• Companies based in Massachusetts
• Technology companies established in 1999
• Technology companies of the United States
• 1999 establishments in Massachusetts

• CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list
• Articles with short description
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