Elasticsearch Essentials

Working with geo-point data

Geo-points are single location points defined by a latitude-longitude pair on the surface of the earth. Using geo-points you can do the following things:

• Calculate the distance between two points
• Find the document that falls in a specified rectangular area
• Sort documents based on distance and score results based on it
• Create clusters of geo-points using aggregations

Mapping geo-point fields

Unlike all the data types in Elasticsearch, geo-point fields can't be determined dynamically. So, you have to define the mapping in advance before indexing data. The mapping for a geo-point field can be defined in the following format:

"location": {
    "type": "geo_point"
}

A geo_point mapping indexes a single field (the location in our example) ...