GeoIntel for Petroleum
May 16th, 2007
We just heard about a new search engine: MetaCarta’s GeoIntel for Petroleum, an “online geographic search for the energy industry.”
The resource bills itself as an “easy to use and efficient tool for discovering Web-based energy-related intelligence that is related to specific geographic places.”
I like the spatial aspect–being able to place your results geographically is a nice feature–but the results themselves don’t appear to offer much more than a google search. I was excited to try GeoIntel because some of our most difficult reference questions deal with energy, specifically requests for oil field related data. The proprietary nature of information in the energy industry makes these questions particularly challenging. This resource doesn’t offer any new insight into that dilemma, but nonetheless, it’s an interesting concept. Try it out and let us know what you think.
May 17th, 2007 at 5:15 am
Sam, you are correct that the documents currently indexed in GeoIntel for Petroleum are available through other search engines. The difference is that for you to find documents about a specific area, you must guess the location names used by the author, which is obviously a time consuming and often futile task.
MetaCarta solves this problem by GeoParsing the documents. Our natural language analysis engine extracts and resolves the coordinate meanings of rich text phrases, like Ras Budran Raha.
Now, users can find everything written about any place simply by zooming a map — no more guessing geographic sounding keywords.
Even seemingly simple searches like “red sea” get much better results when you use a map. To see what I mean, try a GeoIntel for Petroleum search for “-red -sea” when zoomed into the Red Sea area. The minus sign operator means exclude documents with this word. You will find that there are many documents about places in this area that do not mention the seemingly obvious region name. Here’s a link to -red -sea in the Red Sea:
http://geointel.metacarta.com/geosearch.html?topic=-red+-sea&place=Red+Sea
Try mousing over the red document icons and looking at the text on the left. The location names are highlighted.
We are now expanding our crawling to reach deeper into web resources and private publishers relevant to this industry. We expect this to solve the dilemma you mentioned. Over time, we will make GeoIntel for Petroleum the richest source of oil field information.
If you have suggestions about content that you would like to see in GeoIntel for Petroleum, please post to the Feedback form on the GeoIntel page.
May 17th, 2007 at 1:04 pm
Rick, Thanks for clarifying. So many of our searches are geographically-based–we often encourage our students to search iteratively using variations on a place name at different local, regional and national scales (ex. Lake Tahoe, Northern Sierra Nevada, California, Nevada, county names, etc.) just to solve the problem you described with the “-red -sea” example. Your GeoParsing tool will be quite useful for these types of queries.