Elasticsearch in Action

Appendix A. Working with geospatial data

Geospatial data makes your search application location-aware. For example, to search for events that are close to you, to find restaurants in a certain area, or to see which park’s area intersects with the area of the city center, you’d work with geospatial data.

We’ll call events and restaurants in this context points because they’re essentially points on the map. We’ll put areas, such as a country or a rectangle that you draw on a map, under the generic umbrella of shapes. Geospatial search works with points, shapes, and various relations between them:

• Distance between a point and another point— If where you are is a point and swimming pools are other points, you can search for the closest swimming ...