[LUCENE-2151] Abstract the distance calculation process in the Spatial contrib

• Type: Improvement
• Status: Closed
• Priority: Major
• Resolution: Won't Fix
• Affects Version/s: 3.1
• Component/s: modules/spatial
• Lucene Fields: New
• Assignee: Chris Male
• Reporter: Chris Male
• Created: 11/Dec/09 14:13
• Updated: 28/Aug/22 12:16
• Resolved: 01/Dec/10 09:54

Description

The spatial contrib shouldn't tie users to one particular way of calculating distances. Wikipedia lists multiple different formulas for the great-circle distance calculation, and there are alternatives to that as well. In a situation where many documents have the same points, it would be useful to be able to cache some calculated values as well (currently this is sort of handled in the filtering process itself).

This issue addresses this by abstracting away the distance calculator, allowing the user to provide the implementation of choice. It would then be possible to swap in different distance calculation strategies without altering the distance filtering process itself.

Issue Links

• is depended upon by: LUCENE-2395 Add a scoring DistanceQuery that does not need caches and separate filters
• is depended upon by: LUCENE-2139 Cleanup and Improvement of Spatial Contrib
• is part of: LUCENE-2350 Refactor/Cleanup Lucene Spatial