Book Image

Lucene 4 Cookbook

By : Edwood Ng, Vineeth Mohan
Book Image

Lucene 4 Cookbook

By: Edwood Ng, Vineeth Mohan

Overview of this book

Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Lucene 4 Cookbook
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Exploring spatial search


Spatial search provides the ability to search by location data. This is also called geo-spatial search. We usually leverage this type of search to look for things within a certain location proximity. It's very useful in map applications where most of the searches are about searching nearby places. Lucene provides this feature by incorporating another open source project called Spatial4j. This offers utilities for shape and distance calculation. Lucene uses these utilities to generate indexable fields to perform query calculations.

When dealing with spatial search, there are several considerations. Are we indexing points or shapes? What kind of shapes are we indexing? Can a document contain more than one point/shape? What kind of query is supported? There is no one solution that fits all in spatial search.

Lucene provides four built-in spatial strategies to help handle various types of spatial search requirements:

  • BBoxStrategy: This strategy permits indexing and searching...