Caldwell earns first prize award at ESRI Conference

Aug 2007 -- Alexandria, Va. -- ERDC's physical scientist Douglas Caldwell, Topographic Engineering Center (TEC), recently earned the first prize award in the "Best Software Integration" category at the 2007 Environmental Systems Research Institute (ESRI) Conference for his poster "Geoparsing: Geospatial Alchemy," as part of the Map Gallery Awards. This was a joint effort with Jisheng Liang and Kris Koperski both of Insightful Corp., a leading provider of predictive analytics and reporting solutions. ESRI is a major software developer.

The poster highlighted TEC's "GeoText" Phase II Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) effort. The Department of Defense SBIR program funds early-stage research and development (R&D) at small technology companies to stimulate technological innovation; increase private sector commercialization of federal R&D; increase small business participation in federally funded R&D; and foster participation by minority and disadvantaged firms in technological innovation. The program provides up to $850,000 in early-stage R&D funding directly to companies or individual entrepreneurs who form a company.

The goal of geoparsing is to produce actionable geospatial information. Geoparsing identifies and "geotags" place names (countries, cities, rivers, etc.) in text documents and associates them with their coordinates on a map. Location summaries allow an analyst to view, edit and summarize place name data in multiple ways. These include organizing the results by first occurrence in the document, frequency of occurrence, confidence, country, feature type, or alphabetically.

For maximum flexibility, the Insightful geoparsing software exports data in a variety of formats, including XML (including original text, tags and feature information for tags), tab-delimited files, and Keyhole Markup Language (KML) files.

The Insightful geoparsing software can read ASCII text files, Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) files, Extensible Markup Language (XML files), Portable Document File (PDF) files, and Microsoft Word files, as well as text that is cut and pasted into the application. The map and text view are synchronized, so that names in highlighted sections of the text are displayed on the map or selected names on the map are highlighted in the text. The user can choose to see the names as written in the text or the approved names as specified in the gazetteer.