A survey on multidimensional access methods

Abstract

The extraordinary format of spatial data and the fact that there is no straightforward mapping of spatial objects from the multidimensional space to the 1-dimensional space, stimulated various researchers during the past two decades to develop multidimensional access methods that facilitate efficient indexing of spatial objects in large databases. This survey paper tries a classification of existing multidimensional access methods, according to the types of data they are most suitable for (points or objects with spatial extent), their structure (hierarchical or flat), and their performance over spatial queries. Most of this work is based on an excellent survey paper[Gaed97]