Free Text and Spatial Search with Spatial4J and Lucene Spatial by Steven Citron-Pousty.
From the post:
Hey there, Shifters. One of my talks at FOSS4G 2013 covered Lucene Spatial. Todays post is going to follow up on my post about creating Lucene Indices by adding spatial capabilities to the index. In the end you will have a a full example on how create a fast and full featured full text spatial search on any documents you want to use.
How to add spatial to your Lucene index
In the last post I covered how to create a Lucene index so in this post I will just cover how to add spatial. The first thing you need to understand are the two pieces of how spatial is handled by Lucene. A lot of this work is done by Dave Smiley. He gave a great presentation on all this technology at Lucene/Solr Revolution 2013. If you really want to dig in deep, I suggest you watch his 1:15 h:m long video – my blog post is more the Too Long Didn’t Listen (TL;DL) version.
- Spatial4J: This Java library provides geospatial shapes, distance calculations, and importing and exporting shapes. It is Apache Licensed so it can be used with other ASF projects. Lucene Spatial uses Spatial4J to create the spatial objects that get indexed along with the documents. It will also be used when calculating distances in a query or when we want to convert between distance units. Spatial4J is able to handle real-world on a sphere coordinates (what comes out of a GPS unit) and projected coordinates (any 2D map) for both shapes and distances.
Short aside: The oldest Java based spatial library is JTS and is used in many other Open Source Java geospatial projects. Spatial4J uses JTS under the hood if you want to work with Polygon shapes. Unfortunately, until recently it was LGPL and so could not be included in Lucene. JTS has announced it’s intention to go to a BSD type license which should allow Spatial4J and JTS to start working together for more Java Spatial goodness for all. One of the beauties of FOSS is the ability to see development discussions happen in the open.
- Lucene Spatial After many different and custom iterations – there is now lucene spatial built right into Lucene as a standard library. It is new with the 4.x releases of Lucene. What Lucene spatial does is provide the indexing and search strategies for spatial4j shapes stored in a Lucene index. It has SpatialStrategy as the base class to define the signature that any spatial strategy must fulfill. You then use the same strategy for the index writing and reading.
Today I will show the code to use spatial4j with Lucene Spatial to add a spatially indexed field to your lucene index.
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Pay special attention to the changes that made it possible for Spatial4J and JTS work together.
Cooperation between projects makes the resulting whole stronger.
Some office projects need to have that realization.