Patent ID: 7325001

Claim:
A system, comprising: means for partitioning each of a plurality of dimensions in a multidimensional (MD) feature space into a plurality of intervals; for each interval, means for forming an associated data structure that indicates which of a plurality of MD data objects coupled to the MD feature space match the interval, wherein the means for forming an associated data structure forms each data structure to comprise a bit vector index, and wherein each bit vector index has a plurality of bits, each bit in a bit vector corresponds to a single hyper-rectangle and indicates whether the corresponding hyper-rectangle overlaps the interval associated with the data structure; means for receiving a query point and selecting an interval in each dimension that is overlapped by the query point; means for processing each data structure associated with a selected interval to determine a set of MD data objects; and means for determining a subset of the MD data objects that overlap the query point.