Lens provides an easy way for user's to explore their data sets. Lens provides the ability to easily switch between views such as bar chart, pie chart, data table and so on. There have been requests to explore the possibility of a map view. This would allow users to drag a geospatial field into the editor and view a map or switch chart types to view a map.

I tried hacking around to see if Lens could use Elastic Maps for geo, branch can be found at https://github.com/nreese/kibana/tree/lens_maps.

Road blocks

1. Elastic Maps is configuration driven where the configuration defines layers. Layer configuration defines source configuration. Source configuration is used by Elastic Maps to fetch data internally. Elastic maps does not accept a table of results at the moment.
2. Lens separates data source from renderer. The renderer receives a table that has been decoupled from the data source. For example, the table contains a column but the renderer does not know that the column came from an index pattern, the aggregation used to generate the column values, or the field name used to generate the column values. There is no way for Lens to pass data source configuration directly to the renderer.
3. The only existing data source for Lens is Index Pattern which would be compatible with Elastic Maps. Lens is planning future data sources that are not based on Index Patterns. Future data sources may not be compatible with Elastic Maps.