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We've discussed this, and it seems feasible to display the specific fine grained cruise paths in our overall search index by geohashing the track from its g-ring representation during the indexing process. That would mean that, for these data sets, we would use the g-rings in preference to the overall bounding box for indexing. Once the indexing changes are done, the cruises should show up in the current spatial map at their appropriate locations at every zoon level -- i.e., I don't think any UI changes are needed. So this task could likely be conducted by Jing who is already very familiar with indexing.

Note also that Lucene, and hence Solr support indexing and search of spatial features beyond points and bounding boxes when the JTS libraries are enabled. We should consider the ongoing investment in a custom solution based on geohashes versus leveraging the native capabilities available. The geohash approach does provide an effective UI for browse and selection, and at this stage it is unlikely that there are sufficient metadata with more sophisticated geometries to warrant a broad scale shift in technology.

Indexing of geometries to geohashes requires significant additional processing during the indexing process - basically rasterizing the shapes at different resolutions corresponding with the geohash resolutions and recording the geohash values for the resulting points. An example in javascript is available at: https://github.com/derrickpelletier/geohash-poly

See also:

https://sourceforge.net/p/geotools/mailman/message/21388420/

for an example of rasterization in java. Conversion of the resulting points to geohashes is an additional exercise.