Mostly emulating what phpMyAdmin can do, the time spent for a elasticsearch beginner trying to figure out how to clear a index without losing or having to rebuild their mapping is insane, basically the answer is just don't and just copy your mapping but if something could easily extract that and say flush index then awesome. Creating mappings is a nightmare if you don't remember what types they have and it would be insanely simple to do the phpMyAdmin style of create table where you type in a "column" name and then use the drop down for the type "string, date, geo point".