Location Awareness

Location awareness includes the ability to sort, filter and rank documents based on their geographical distance from a given source position - typically the position of the end user. Geographically based search is one of its key capabilities.

FAST ESP supports geographical coordinates that can be associated with documents and allows users to sort and filter query results based on a geographical location.

The Location Awareness capability is based on indexing content tagged with location information. Users can add location information as metadata from the content source, or add it during document processing based on an analysis of the content, mapping from a URL, etc. A document may be associated with more than one location. The indexer uses an optimized geographical index structure for high-performance location-enabled queries. It is possible to specify a geographical constraint in a query.

Source: FAST ESP Brochure 2007