Recent developments in spatial indexing in Lucene/Solr

Lucene 4’s New Spatial Module David Smiley, MITRE Lucene’s former spatial contrib is gone and in its place is an entirely new spatial module developed by several well-known names in the Lucene/Solr spatial community. The heart of this module is an approach in which spatial geometries are indexed using edge-ngram tokenized geohashes searched with a PrefixTree/Trie recursive algorithm. It sounds cool and it is!

In this presentation, you’ll see how Lucene 4’s new spatial module works, why its fast, and what new things you can do with it. Key features are support for multi-valued fields, and indexing shapes with area ̶ even polygons. You’ll see a live demonstration and a visual representation of geohash indexed shapes. Finally, this talk will conclude with a look at the future direction of the module. This session will cover these improvements in detail, comparing and contrasting to previous versions of Solr.