Geospatial indexing should work with spherical surfaces

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    • Type: Improvement
    • Resolution: Duplicate
    • Priority: Major - P3
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    • Affects Version/s: None
    • Component/s: Querying
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      Geospatial indexing, and querying those data assumes that a surface is Cartesian surface (flat). This is not the case with the Earth. Treating geographical coordinates as Cartesian coordinates, leads to obvious errors.

      I believe $center and $box queries could possibly be "fixed" by most people by upcoming search within polygon SERVER-772, but obviously this won't fix $near results errors.

      It is very desired that there is some kind of specifying that geospatial index should work with sphere, not flat surface.

      Maybe a way to do it from user's point of view would be:

      db.places.create_index(

      {location: ["2d", 6500]}

      )

      Specifying radius of sphere this way would make sense for people who want to use different units than kilometers, or map things on different surfaces (Mars, anyone?).

              Assignee:
              Eliot Horowitz (Inactive)
              Reporter:
              Hubert Lepicki
              Votes:
              13 Vote for this issue
              Watchers:
              9 Start watching this issue

                Created:
                Updated:
                Resolved: