I am using Neo4j with PHP. In my project, I have restaurant nodes. Each node has latitude, longitude and taxonomy properties.
I need to return the restaurant nodes matching user's given taxonomy with results ordered by distance from user's location (that is nearest restaurant at the first).
What is the easiest solution?
I have worked on Mongo DB and Elasticsearch,this is very easy to achieve there using special indexing. But I could not find a straightforward way in Neo4j.
There are a couple of solutions :
Using neo4j spatial plugin : https://github.com/neo4j-contrib/spatial
Computing the distance yourself with haversin in Cypher : http://neo4j.com/docs/stable/query-functions-mathematical.html#functions-spherical-distance-using-the-haversin-function
In 3.0Mx there should be basic Cypher functions for point and distance : https://github.com/neo4j/neo4j/pull/5397/files (I didn't tested it though)
Besides the aforementioned Neo4j-Spatial, in Neo4j 3.0 there is also a built in distance() function.
See this GraphGist:
http://jexp.github.io/graphgist/idx?dropbox-14493611%2Fcypher_spatial.adoc
So if you find and match your restaurants some way you can order them by distance:
MATCH (a:Location), (b:Restaurant)
WHERE ... filtering ...
RETURN b
ORDER BY distance(point(a),point(b))
