Introducing geo-spatial data

Geo-spatial data is information of any object on the earth and is presented by numeric values called latitude-longitude (lat-lon) that are presented on geographical systems. Apart from lat-lon, a geo-spatial object also contains other information about that object such as name, size, and shape. Elasticsearch is very helpful when working with such kinds of data. It doesn't only provide powerful geo-location searches, but also has functionalities such as sorting with geo distance, creating geo clusters, scoring based on location, and working with arbitrary geo-shapes.

Elasticsearch has two data types to solely work on geo-spatial data; they are as follows:

• geo_point: This is a combination of latitude-longitude pairs that defines a single location point

• geo_shape: This works on latitude-longitudes, but with complex shapes such as points, multi-points, lines, circles, polygons, and multi-polygons defined by a geo-JSON data structure