An approach for spatial search using SOLR

A large fraction of documents on W3 (World Wide Web) contains geo-spatial context, but conventional search engines treat the query place name in the same way as any other keyword and retrieve documents that include the specified name. Such results, retrieved through conventional approach may be sufficient for many users but there are many occasions when user is interested in documents that are related to the region of space as user specified in his query, but which might not actually include the place name. This could generally happen in the situation when there were documents that used alternative names, or referred places that were in or nearby the particular place. In the current work an approach for indexing the document along with its spatial information is being discussed that can help to search the spatial data as per ones' need. Further it has also been explored how Solr, an open source software can be a helpful platform for developing a spatial information retrieval tool.