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. Kurniawati, Jin & Shepherd,
   Techniques for supporting efficient content-based retrieval in multimedia databases,
   Australian Computer Journal, 1997

5. 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]

6. Weber & Blott,
   An Approximation-Based Data Struture for Similarity Search,
   Unpublished Report, Bell Labs, 1998
   [provides reasonably formal argument that partitioning-based methods degenerate to worse than linear search once dimensionality around 6..10; proposes VA-files as an alternative]

7. 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 numerous other papers downloaded into /home/jas/papers.