[OSGeo-Discuss] Solr vs PostGIS/WFS

[Angelos Tzotsos]

Hi Cameron,

On 05/06/2014 01:55 AM, Cameron Shorter wrote:
> I've heard a few people recommending [b] Solr [a] for lightning fast 
> spatial search, which leads me to question my understanding of best 
> practice OGC / OSGeo design paradigms.

Solr is one of the most popular enterprise search engine, with NoSQL 
features recently added.
Traditionally it is not used to replace a database but to create indexes 
and make searches very fast.

>
> In particular:
>
> 1. Have people been rolling out Solr's spatial search into production 
> instead of WFS (such as GeoServer)? Why was or was not Solr chosen?

Solr has been widely used in production as part of CKAN [1].
Specifically CKAN with spatial extension was deployed recently in US 
data.gov [2], data.gov.uk [3] and data.gov.au [4] among others.

Two of the OSGeo CSW implementations are planning to support Solr as a 
search back-end [5] [6]

>
> 2. Solr doesn't seem to follow OGC standards (I'd suspect a cut down 
> version of WFS would be appropriate). Are there discussions with the 
> OGC about setting up an appropriate standard which Solr could/should 
> follow?
>
>
> 3. If Solr is indeed a good match for certain use cases, then should 
> we be including it on OSGeo-Live [c]?

In my opinion we should consider CKAN (with spatial extension) to be 
included in OSGeoLive.
>
> [a] https://lucene.apache.org/solr/ Solr is the popular, blazing fast 
> open source enterprise search platform. Its major features include 
> powerful full-text search, hit highlighting, faceted search, near 
> real-time indexing, dynamic clustering, database integration, rich 
> document (e.g., Word, PDF) handling, and *geospatial search*.
>
> [b] 
> http://wiki.hsr.ch/Datenbanken/files/Geospatial_Search_Evaluation_of_Solr_Presentation_HS2013_Wolski.pdf
>
> [c] http://live.osgeo.org
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Discuss mailing list
> Discuss at lists.osgeo.org
> http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss

Best,
Angelos

[1] http://ckan.org/
[2] http://catalog.data.gov
[3] http://data.gov.uk/data/search
[4] http://data.gov.au/dataset
[5] https://github.com/geonetwork/core-geonetwork/wiki/201311solr
[6] https://github.com/geopython/pycsw/issues/208


-- 
Angelos Tzotsos
Remote Sensing Laboratory
National Technical University of Athens
http://users.ntua.gr/tzotsos

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