Elasticsearch has long offered powerful geospatial capabilities, yet it remains underutilised by the open-source GIS community. Two major developments in the past couple of years are changing this. First, Elasticsearch returned to an approved open-source license, reigniting interest among developers. More significantly, the introduction of ES|QL, a declarative query language, has paved the way for OGC-like geospatial functions. This shift makes Elasticsearch feel more familiar to users of tools like PostGIS.

In this talk, we’ll explore the current capabilities of Geospatial ES|QL, demonstrate real-world geospatial search and analytics, and provide a glimpse into future developments that will further enhance Elasticsearch as a geospatial database.