Guard Files: Stabbing and Intersection Queries on Fat Spatial Objects

The design of spatial data structures has made great strides in recent years in response to the increasing importance of applications such as CAD that require great efficiency in spatial database technology and in computational geometry. The variety of spatial data structures and retrieval algorithms known suggests that it is difficult or impossible to design general purpose structures that peform well across the entire spectrum of objects to be stored and queries to be processed-generality comes at the cost of peformance and increased algorithm complexity