Geospatial Semantic Web Blog

MetaCarta GeoParser API is an experimental web service that provides a unified RESTful interface to the MetaCarta LocationFinder and GeoTagger. It takes a document or query string as input and extracts locations referenced in the text. It returns this information in these formats:

• XML in two flavors: “geomarkup” and “locations”
• Javascript for faster import into AJAX apps
• PNG showing the locations

This service is very similar to Geonames search. Both Geonames and GeoParser allow free text search, and both support feature lookup by location names. However, the search of the GeoParser API has few distinctive features that differ from which of the Geonames’s service.

GeoParser allows clients to search for location information by naming a document (example). This presumes the document has been previously crawled by MetaCarta’s engine. For documents that are unknown to the system, clients can send the document URL as part of the query, which will cause to GeoParser to parse the document content and return any discovered location information (example).

GeoParser can also produce a map of locations returned from a search query. Clients can specify the size of a map. The map image can be in the form of PNG or imagemap (example, example).

I’m quite confident that in the near future, we will see more use of services like Geonames and GeoParser in Web 2.0 applications. In addition to enabling web documents to be “location-aware”, another desirable feature is to enable web documents to be “time-aware“.

Note: in addition to the GeoParser API, MetaCarta also made available a list of other tools.