Blog: Geocoding

Putting News Stories on the Map

We’ve long wanted our team aggregator and media analyzer Managing News to automatically geotag the news that it tracks. But getting this to happen presented some interesting questions and challenges. What does it mean to put a news story on map? Should it show where the news is coming from or what part of the world is being talked about?

We decided that in the case of Managing News and the people using it to monitor the news, it’s more important to map what the news is about. We want to be able to show a map that people can look at and immediately know what is being talked about – like in this map, showing news tracked about several key financial institutions activities.

But this raised more questions. How can you geocode the content of a news item, and could we do this meaningfully? And most importantly, how do we identify locations in a stream of text?

The map looked wrong, and when I inspected it closer I saw that it was wrong,
very wrong. Members from Canada were showing up in New Orleans, priests living
in the Vatican appeared in Florida, and the World Bank’s staff was placed in
Washington state instead of Washington, DC.

As I fired off requests to Google's geocoder API to plot several thousand points on a map for a recent project, a quick calculation showed that only about a third of the data returned valid latitude and longitude information. The data set I was dealing with was international - mapping members from nearly every country - so I knew I would have some issues, but only a third successful?