Spatial Indexing in Icad Systems

This paper presents an overview of spatial indexing mechanisms and their implementation in a more general framework, as the one provided by Computer-aided Design systems. It is expected that such mechanisms play an important role in the context of so-called ICAD systems, providing a more rational and efficient management of geometric data. Benefitting from the object-oriented programming concepts of encapsulation, inheritance, and data abstraction, it will be possible to add spatial reasoning capabilities (restricted in our case to indexing problems) to already existing environments with minor changes from an organizational point of view.