Geo Points

A geo-point is a single latitude/longitude point on the Earth’s surface. Geo-points can be used to calculate distance from a point, to determine whether a point falls within a bounding box, or in aggregations.

Geo-points cannot be automatically detected with dynamic mapping. Instead, geo_point fields should be mapped explicitly:

PUT /attractions
{
  "mappings": {
    "restaurant": {
      "properties": {
        "name": {
          "type": "string"
        },
        "location": {
          "type": "geo_point"
        }
      }
    }
  }
}

Lat/Lon Formats

With the location field defined as a geo_point, we can proceed to index documents containing latitude/longitude pairs, which can be formatted as strings, arrays, or objects:

PUT /attractions/restaurant/1
{
  "name":     "Chipotle Mexican Grill",
  "location": "40.715, -74.011" (1)
}

PUT /attractions/restaurant/2
{
  "name":     "Pala Pizza",
  "location": { (2)
    "lat":     40.722,
    "lon":    -73.989
  }
}

PUT /attractions/restaurant/3
{
  "name":     "Mini Munchies Pizza",
  "location": [ -73.983, 40.719 ] (3)
}

  1. A string representation, with "lat,lon".

  2. An object representation with lat and lon explicitly named.

  3. An array representation with [lon,lat].

Caution

Everybody gets caught at least once: string geo-points are "latitude,longitude", while array geo-points are [longitude,latitude]—the opposite order!

Originally, both strings and arrays in Elasticsearch used latitude followed by longitude. However, it was decided early on to switch the order for arrays in order to conform with GeoJSON.

The result is a bear trap that captures all unsuspecting users on their journey to full geolocation nirvana.

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