Hi Christopher, Thanks for your interest in neo4j and neo4j-spatial. I will answer your questions and comments inline.
I am working for the largest German speaking travel and holiday portal. > Currently we are using a relatively simple MySQL based spatial distance > functionality. We plan to enhance this by something which is capable of a > flexible set of spatial queries. We will evaluate Neo4j-Spatial for that > and > benchmark it against PostGIS/PostGreSQL. > This would be a very interesting application for neo4j-spatial. I'm sure we could support you in that. Obviously it is not as mature as PostGIS, but I think it is very suitable for flexible queries, especially if you plan to combine a complex domain model with spatial data, or expose a spatial element to existing domains. I found some Roadmap descriptions in the Neo4j Wiki ( > http://wiki.neo4j.org/content/Neo4j_Spatial_Project_Plan), but I am not > sure > that these are still valid. Craig said (somewhere) that Neo4j Spatial is > still alpha (I hope that this means that only the interfaces are still > unstable). And I know that neo4j-spatial is an open source project where > there is no Neo Technology responsibility. > The project plan you found was unfortunately the original plan put down before neo4j-spatial really started, and represents the expectations for 2010. Most of these were met, and several other capabilities achieved in addition. I will edit the wiki to more accurately reflect the current status of the project. However, it is still true that it is in an alpha state. The API's are likely to change. Since last September we have viewed it as an alpha release, available for people to try out and provide feedback on. We believe it is capable of many useful tasks, and can be used for real applications. But it has not been in the 'wild' for long, and so there are probably remaining bugs and performance issues. In addition, as mentioned before, we will almost certainly change the API's a little as we receive more feedback and move the system forward. Already in 2011 there have been three new additions influencing the API: the SimplePointLayer for LBS and related capabilities, the beginnings of the REST API for inclusion in Neo4j-Server, and the Geoprocessing features. Can you drop a few words about the Spatial roadmap, its stability and > planned licensing (all based on using it on a high volume web site)? > I think we need Peter's opinion on the licensing. I believe it is currently the same as neo4j itself. The code comments state AGPL, and I am not sure if the recent decision to move the core to GPL is applicable to the spatial code. For the roadmap we will also update the wiki pages. Currently the efforts are to: - Improve the OSM model API (some basic API for exploring the OSM ways and nodes, already in place but needing some refinement) - Improve the REST API for spatial (we have some customers trying this out, and will make enhancements based on their feedback) - Integrate the spatial index into the new automatic indexing feature of Neo4j (some initial prototype of this is in place, and will be refined for the 1.5 release of Neo4j) - Improved Geoprocessing support, particularly on the OSM model. This is involving a GSoC project and will be presented at FOSS4G in Denver this year. See http://2011.foss4g.org/sessions/geoprocessing-neo4j-spatial-and-osm Regards, Craig _______________________________________________ Neo4j mailing list User@lists.neo4j.org https://lists.neo4j.org/mailman/listinfo/user
