1. Berchtold & Böhm & Kriegel,
   The Pyramid Technique: Towards breaking the curse of dimensionality,
   ACM SIGMOD, 1998
   [proposes a new data access technique which is optimized for high-dimensional range queries]

2. Gaede & Günther,
   Multidimensional access methods,
   Technical Report, Humboldt University, Berlin, 1995
   [comprehensive survey of multidimensional database access methods]

3. Hellerstein, Koutsoupias & Papadimitriou,
   On the analysis of indexing schemes,
   ACM PODS, 1997
   [initial work on a general theory of "indexability", which is analogous to complexity theory and describes how effective data/query/access-method combinations are in terms of disk access and storage cost]

4. Megiddo & Shaft,
   Efficient nearest neighbour indexing based on a collection of space-filling curves,
   IBM Internal Research Report, 1997
   [description of method to index multidimensional data based on a multiple complementary "linearisations" of the data points]

5. White & Jain,
   Algorithms and Strategies for Similarity Retrieval,
   UCSD Visual Computing Lab Report, 1996
   [survey and characterisation of a large number of approaches to multidimensional access methods]

Plus other papers in /home/jas/papers.