Geocoding Comes To UK

A major British press group is on the brink of using automated geotagging software provided by MetaCarta.

The US-based company has revealed it is supplying a big player in the UK press market with a software package which automatically tags stories with relevant area codes, reports Press Gazette.

MetaCarta already provides geocoding services to Reuters and several US regional titles such as the San Antonio Express-News, which sends email alerts according to users’ local interests.

And now the Massachusetts firm has modified and customised its software to make it suitable for British location searches.

“I believe there are about 85 Parises in the world. But we have the ability to identify the right one - and in fact that it’s not Paris Hilton but rather Paris, Texas or Paris, France,” said Rick Hutton, director of content services at MetaCarta.

Hutton also pointed out the advantages of automated geotagging: “If you wanted to find out about a murder in Sudbury with a keyword search engine, you would only get those documents that mention the word ‘Sudbury’.

“With our technology, it would find anything that happened in the area around Sudbury.

“The document might mention a village, or a street in Sudbury, or even one particular store, but it might not ever mention the name of the town itself.”

Among the British publishers pressing ahead with automated geotagging is Archant, which is scheduled to launch its new coding system by the middle of this year.