Overview (Lucene 3.6.1 API)

Packages
Package	Description
org.apache.lucene.spatial	Support for geospatial search.
org.apache.lucene.spatial.geohash	Support for Geohash encoding, decoding, and filtering.
org.apache.lucene.spatial.geometry	Coordinate and distance representations.
org.apache.lucene.spatial.geometry.shape	Shape representations.
org.apache.lucene.spatial.tier	Support for filtering based upon geographic location.
org.apache.lucene.spatial.tier.projections	Spatial projections.

DEPRECATED

The Lucene 3.x spatial contrib module is deprecated as of Lucene 3.6. In Lucene 4 there is a new spatial module that should be used instead. For further information, see LUCENE-2599.
The old documentation follows below:

This package makes it possible to filter and sort according to geographical constraints. For example, filter to include only restaurants within 2 miles of a specified latitude/longitude, sorting by distance ascending.

See here for details on the technical approach.

Unfortunately, this package is still very new, and has little to no documentation. It's best to ask for pointers on java-user@lucene.apache.org, and look at the unit tests included in the source distribution.

There are also known issues, eg at least LUCENE-1781 and LUCENE-1815.

NOTE: This package is still in flux and might change in incompatible ways in the next release.

Lucene 3.6.1 contrib-spatial API

DEPRECATED