Wednesday, February 19, 2014

MongoDB support for geo-location data

It was interesting to learn that FourSquare uses MongoDB to store all its geo-spatial data. I was also enlightening to see JSON standards for expressing GPS coordinates and other geo-spatial data. The following links would give quick information about GeoJSON and TopoJSON.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeoJSON
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TopoJSON
http://bost.ocks.org/mike/topology/
https://github.com/mbostock/topojson/blob/master/README.md

MongoDB supports the GeoJSON format and allows us to easily build location aware applications. For e.g. Using MongoDB geospatial query operators, you can -
  • Query for locations contained entirely within a specified polygon.
  • Query for locations that intersect with a specified geometry. We can supply a point, line, or polygon, and any document that intersects with the supplied geometry will be returned.
  • Query for the points nearest to another point.
As you can see these queries make it very easy to find documents (JSON objects) that are near a given point or documents that lie within a given polygon.

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