Importance of GeoTagging

For intelligence organizations, data is critical to understanding threats and protecting assets. Unfortunately, the amount of unstructured data created each day is overwhelming—and it’s only useful when given meaning. Intelligence organizations that depend on geolocational data can gain deeper insight through geotagging.

What Is GeoTagging & How Does It Work?

“The Eiffel Tower is located in Paris.”

What is this snippet of text? It could be a social media post or an email. Or, it could be a sentence found inside a document or a presentation. Since this snippet lacks metadata and can’t be indexed, it’s known as unstructured text.

Geotagging is the process of finding geographic coordinates for places mentioned in unstructured text. It gives you the ability to identify critical entities and know, with precision, where they’re located.

For example, geotagging is extremely important in helping to identify precise locations of enemy or military assets or individuals on terror watch lists. In our snippet example above, geotagging can help us determine whether the Eiffel Tower is located in Paris, France, or Paris, Tennessee.

How Does Geotagging Work?

The process of geotagging involves many steps that happen behind the scenes. For example, the first step is to identify places mentioned inside a piece of unstructured text. This is done through entity extraction.

Once an entity is extracted from the unstructured text, it is then compared to a list of entity names known as a gazetteer. The gazetteer houses the latitude and longitude of each entity for easy identification. 

The gazetteer can return multiple entities due to similar location names (like our Paris example above). The final step is to remove ambiguity through natural language processing (NLP), which analyzes the context of the text and surrounding locations to return the right coordinates.

GeoTagging Is Critical for Intelligence

Unstructured text isn’t readily usable by critical geospatial tools. For intelligence organizations to use unstructured text to improve security, they must use geotagging to place meaning on the text. Geotagging helps intelligence organizations:

• Pinpoint areas of attack: Geotagging helps you pinpoint areas of terrorist activity and other potential attacks anywhere in the world. This information can also help you see patterns, giving you critical insight into what may happen next.

Rosoka: Go Beyond Geographic Location Identification

Rosoka’s GeoGravy solution provides so much more than geographical location identification. GeoGravy bridges the gap between text data and geospatial metadata so you can simply organize your data by location.

GeoGravy’s Worldwide Gazetteer

GeoGravy includes an inclusive gazetteer for accuracy, including the National Geospatial Agency’s (NGA) GNS, the United States Geological Survey’s (USGS) GNIS, and GeoGravy’s own internally developed gazetteer for worldwide coverage. 

This coverage enables our solution to retrieve all of the place names associated with the geo-coordinates found with your unstructured content. As a result, you can identify important landmarks and facilities for actionable intelligence.

Linguistic Experience

GeoGravy leverages our linguistic expertise to attribute information to differentiate between multiple places with the same name. This ensures that “Salisbury” is properly identified as Salisbury, North Carolina, or Salisbury, England.

Intelligence organizations must make sense of multilingual data from around the globe. Language isn’t a roadblock for Rosoka. All of our solutions offer NLP in over 200 languages.

Plus, all of our solutions are completely customizable to fit your specific needs. Plus, we’re already embedded in and approved by many military, law enforcement, and intelligence organizations.

Reach Out to Us to Learn More About Our GeoTagging Capabilities

Rosoka helps you solve the various challenges that come with geotagging such as ambiguous place names and language barriers. To learn more about Rosoka and NLP, give us a call at 703-391-0381 or send us a message.