This document discusses geospatial search capabilities with Apache Solr. It defines geospatial search and geolocation, describes how to configure Drupal to support geospatial search with Solr through modules like search_api and location, and provides an example of custom coding needed to properly index and facet location fields for geospatial queries. Future improvements discussed include adding radius box search by city and visualizing search results on a map.

1. Geospatial search with
SOLR
Nicolas Leroy

3. Geospatial search with
SOLR

4. Who am I?
Nicolas Leroy - AUSY/Dataflow
Twitter: nicolasleroy
Drupal.org: http://drupal.org/user/3527

5. SOLR

6. SOLR
Solr is the popular, blazing fast open source
enterprise search platform from the Apache
Lucene project.
Its major features include powerful full-text
search, hit highlighting, faceted search,
dynamic clustering, database integration, rich
document handling, and geospatial search.
Solr is written in Java

7. SOLR
More information:
http://lucene.apache.org/solr/

8. SOLR
Single core vs Multicore
One index vs Multiple indexes

9. Multicore

10. Multicore
Startup script:
cd /Applications/apache-solr-3.5.0/server
java -Dsolr.solr.home=multicore -jar start.jar

11. Geospatial search

12. Geospatial search: definition
wikipedia:
Geomatics (also known as geospatial
technology or geomatics engineering) is the
discipline of gathering, storing, processing, and
delivering geographic information, or
spatially referenced information.

13. Latitude and longitude

14. Latitude and longitude
Latitude = horizontal lines
Longitude = vertical lines

15. World map

16. Geolocation

17. Geolocation: ground mark
Surveyor-General Victoria (SGV) is responsible
for Victoria’s Geodetic Survey Control Network.
This is the infrastructure used to provide
accurate position and height referencing across
Victoria. It is made up of 140,000 ground marks
http://www.dse.vic.gov.au/property-titles-and-
maps/surveying-home-page/government-
survey-services/victorias-survey-infrastructure

18. Drupal + SOLR

19. Drupal + SOLR: modules
• search_api + search_api_solr
• apachesolr

20. Geospatial Options
• geofield + geocoder + search_api +
search_api_location
• location + search_api + search_api_location
• location + gmap + apachesolr +
apachesolr_location
• apachesolr_geo still a sandbox, not much
information.

21. Drupal + SOLR
Drupal:
http://drupal.org/start
Apachesolr module
http://drupal.org/project/apachesolr
Download SOLR:
http://www.apache.org/dyn/closer.cgi/lucene/
solr/3.6.0

22. Drupal + SOLR
Nice tutorial:
http://www.nickveenhof.be/blog/simple-guide-
install-apache-solr-3x-drupal-7
Check his blog for screencasts:
http://www.nickveenhof.be/

24. Our Story
• Drupal site
• Using SOLR with apachesolr module
• Location module
Problem:
Location information wasn't indexed

25. Drupal: Location module
The Location module allows real-world
geographic locations to be associated with
Drupal nodes.
http://drupal.org/project/location

26. Location in action
http://drupal7.local:8080/node/1/edit

27. Why not indexed?
SOLR doesn't know what to do with this custom
field.
And this field contains multiple values (street,
city, province, country,...)

28. Solution
We wrote some custom code to:
• index location information properly
• generate facets
• provide a search form for geospatial search
(longitude, latitude + radius)
We changed schema.xml to use a
"solr.LatLonType" field.

29. Schema?

30. Schema.xml?
The schema.xml file contains all of the details
about which fields your documents can
contain, and how those fields should be dealt
with when adding documents to the index, or
when querying those fields.
Schema.xml comes with the apachesolr
module and is configured to handle drupal
content.

31. Schema.xml?
<!-- A specialized field for geospatial search. If
indexed, this fieldType must not be multivalued.
-->
<fieldType name="location"
class="solr.LatLonType"
subFieldSuffix="_coordinate"/>

32. Schema.xml
This field is now included in schema.xml that
comes with apachesolr module.

33. Code

34. Index location information
hook_apachesolr_update_index(&$document,
$node) = DEPRECATED
Now use:
hook_index_document_build_ENTITYTYPE

35. Create new facets
hook_facetapi_facet_info($searcher_info)

36. apachesolr_location module
http://drupal.org/project/apachesolr_location

37. Map fields

38. Indexing callback

39. Create facets

40. Doing the geospatial search
Adding a part to the querystring when
searching:
&spatial=[lat]_[long]_[radius]
hook_apachesolr_query_alter($query)

41. hook_apachesolr_query_alter
$query->addParam('fq', "{!geofilt
sfield=locs_coordinates" . " pt=" . $keys[0] . ',' .
$keys[1] . " d=" . $distance . "}");
{!geofilt sfield=locs_coordinates pt=50.879816,
4.706429 d=10}

42. Too hacky (via url)
Should be done with querytypes.

43. Small Demo
http://drupal7.local:8080

44. Future?

45. Future
• Adding city + radius box
• Getting coordinates of the city
• Search for items within that range
• Adding visualisation
• Settings UI: miles or km,…
What would you add? Let us know!
http://drupal.org/project/apachesolr_location

47. Feedback & follow-up:
http://drupalcampgent.be/feedback