Locationsor

Locationsor is a hypothetical open-source framework and data model for discovering and indexing geospatial locations. It is designed to enable flexible, privacy-conscious location search across heterogeneous data stores and coordinate systems.

The architecture combines four core components: a data layer that stores or connects to diverse sources; a spatial index that supports fast proximity and region queries; a query engine that composes spatial and attribute predicates; and an API layer for clients and services. The system emphasizes modularity, allowing deployments from lightweight edge setups to centralized cloud installations.

The Locationsor data model centers on Location resources characterized by geometry (points, lines, polygons), a name, and descriptive metadata such as category, reliability, and timestamp. It uses a standardized schema and GeoJSON-compatible interchange format to promote interoperability. The model supports multilingual labels and versioned metadata to track updates over time.

Locationsor offers a lightweight query language and operators for proximity, containment, intersection, and attribute filtering, plus ranking by relevance and privacy-preserving aggregates. Connectors exist for PostGIS, Elasticsearch, MongoDB, and vector tile sources, enabling hybrid deployments from on-premises to cloud. The framework also envisions policy controls for access management and data governance to align with licensing and consent requirements.

Conceptual and practical discussions describe Locationsor as a potential standard for geospatial search, emphasizing data governance, licensing clarity, and performance scalability. As a relatively new or theoretical project, it has not achieved broad adoption, but it informs ongoing work on open spatial data interoperability and developer-friendly geospatial data access.