Geo Shape Filter

Elasticsearch allows us to query data using a Geo Shape filter. For example if we wanted to identify all accidents which occurred within a particular area we can make the following query:

curl -XPOST 'http://127.0.01:9200/accidents/_search' -d '{
    "query": {
        "filtered": {
            "query": {
                "match_all": {}
            },
            "filter": {
                "geo_shape": {
                    "geometry": {
                        "shape": {
                            "type": "Polygon",
                            "coordinates": [
                                [
                                    [
                                        144.9400520324707,
                                        -37.82158204850761
                                    ],
                                    [
                                        144.9400520324707,
                                        -37.79391457604158
                                    ],
                                    [
                                        145.0059700012207,
                                        -37.79391457604158
                                    ],
                                    [
                                        145.0059700012207,
                                        -37.82158204850761
                                    ],
                                    [
                                        144.9400520324707,
                                        -37.82158204850761
                                    ]
                                ]
                            ]
                        }
                    }
                }
            }
        }
    }
}' | python -m json.tool

In the above example we're asking for any accidents which intersect with a basic polygon. This yields 3401 accidents and Elasticsearch took 30ms to process the request:

{
   "took": 30,
   "timed_out": false,
   "_shards": {
      "total": 5,
      "successful": 5,
      "failed": 0
   },
   "hits": {
      "total": 3401,
      "max_score": 1,
      "hits": [....]
    }
}

Using this type of filter is useful if you want to pass arbitrary geometries to Elasticsearch. For example this filter could be used to return all accidents within the bounding box on a map. Another way of doing this would be to use the Geo Bounding Box filter