GSI dataflex®

One of the key tasks in any intelligence analysis is identifying locations and their place names. In areas of the world where place names are not romanized, or conventions for the generic portion of names vary, the task of searching for locations can become complex and time consuming.Geographic Services, Inc. (GSI) has been working with the Geographic Names database for over 8 years. One of the primary technologies developed as a result of this eﬀort is the GSI DataFlex® search engine. GSI DataFlex® is a specialized search tool which enables eﬃcient, multi-lingual, phonetic-based search. It is uniquely designed to work with non-romanized and script based languages where many other search engines fail.

An Example:

The City of Al Qurayyat (اﻟﻘرﯾﺎت) in Northern Western Saudi Arabia can not be easily located using traditional search tools, unless the user knows how the name was originally romanized. The process is made more difficult as the city’s Airport is romanized differently as “Gurayat Airport” and appears as so on many online sources. GSI DataFlex® can readily identify the correct location when any similar sounding spellings such as “Qorayat” or “Gorayat” is provided. Additionally, GSI DataFlex® organizes the results by country and provides a map-based interface allowing the user to quickly narrow down results and identify the correct location.

GSI DATAFLEX® IS AVAILABLE IN NUMEROUS FORMATS:

a desktop application
an ArcGIS add-on
a webservice, as an API
an iOs mobile application