Matt Pearce writes:
We have been working with a client who needs to search for documents based on location, either using a single point or (sometimes very) complex polygons. They supplied the location data in WKT format which we assumed we could feed directly into our search engine (in this case Solr) without any modifications being necessary.
Then we started testing the location searches using parameters in lat, long format. These were translated into a Solr filter query such as:
{!geofilt sfield=location pt=53.45,-0.25 d=20}
which produced no results, even though we knew there were documents well within the bounds of the search range. Reversing the coordinates did produce results though, and that seemed like a quick solution, so we assumed there was a problem in Solr that needed to be flagged.
This seemed like a problem that other Solr users would have come across, so I checked in JIRA, but nobody had raised it as an issue. That was a red flag to me, so I took a look at the code, and discovered that in the situation above, the first number is taken to be the y-coordinate, while the second is the x-coordinate. Very strange. I still didn’t want to raise a new issue, since it was looking increasingly like a problem with either our data or the request.
It turns out that in WKT format, the longitude coordinate comes first. We could safely reverse the coordinates in our search string because all our locations were in the UK, but this wouldn’t work for points in the US, for example, where longitudes go beyond -90. The coordinate order is mentioned in the GeoJSON specification, and on the Elasticsearch Geo Shape Type page, although I initially found it in some helper pages for SQL Server 2008! Unfortunately, it is not mentioned in the Solr documentation, as far as I can see, nor the Wikipedia entry for WKT.
In short, if you are representing geographical location data in WKT (and storing it in Solr or Elasticsearch), longitude comes first!
