[TCMUG] location aware search (using apache lucene/solr)

[Mark MacLennan]

I wonder if anyone had seen the following and in particular had any
experience using Lucene/Solr for this purpose:

[Proposal] Apache SIS, A toolkit for constructing spatial information systems
http://wiki.apache.org/incubator/SpatialProposal
http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/incubator-general/201002.mbox/%3C4B6C8E2D.8010304@holsman.net%3E

Of more immediate interest is that SIS derives from the existing
geographic search capabilities of Apache Lucene
(http://lucene.apache.org/) and Solr (http://lucene.apache.org/solr/).

LocalLucene
  http://wiki.apache.org/lucene-java/SpatialSearch
  http://www.nsshutdown.com/projects/lucene/whitepaper/locallucene_v2.html
  http://blog.jteam.nl/2009/12/31/spatial-lucene-2-0/


This following article discusses finding geodata (OpenStreetMap) using
search software such Solr (front-end to Lucene):

"Location-aware search with Apache Lucene and Solr"
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/opensource/library/j-spatial/index.html


Another application apparently already currently using Solr/Lucene for
this purpose (with Geonames and OpenStreetMap) is:
"Gisgraphy"
http://www.gisgraphy.com/

'Gisgraphy is a free and open source framework. Its goal is to provide
tools to use free GIS Data on the Web via REST webservices. Actually
it manage Geonames and OpenStreetMap (34 million entries). it provides
an importer to inject the data into a strongly typed Postgres /
Postgis database and use them via webservices : worldwide geocoding,
worldwide reverse geocoding, fulltext and find nearby. Results can be
output in XML, Atom, RSS, JSON, PHP, Ruby, and Python.'

- Mark