Indexing Regional Objects in High-Dimensional Spaces

Many spatial access methods, such as the R-tree, have been designed to support spatial search operators (e.g., overlap, containment, and enclosure) over both points and regional objects in multi-dimensional spaces. Unfortunately, contemporary spatial access methods are limited by many problems that significantly degrade the query performance in high-dimensional spaces. This chapter reviews the problems of contemporary spatial access methods in spaces with many dimensions and presents an efficient approach to building advanced spatial access methods that effectively attack these problems. It also discusses the importance of high-dimensional spatial access methods for the emerging database applications, such as location-based services.