無所不在的網路基礎建設已經是上個世紀中促進傳遞資訊的有效媒介。透用瀏覽器，人們可以存取遠端伺服器上許多的多媒體文件，而不需要親自到那裡去。隨著多媒體線上內容資訊量的快速增加，查詢結果的精緻程度變得相當重要，以助於維繫瀏覽過程中的主要焦點。傳統的資料庫已經成功的利用數值和文字的屬性來管理以等性為基礎的資料。維了擴充它的索引能力來管理多媒體資料，許多的多維資料索引技術已經被提出來。在這篇論文中我們將探討這些多維資料結構的演進，與其背後的考量因素。我們特別的研究存取高維資料所遇到的困難。為了測量它的性質，我們提出了許多模型來衡量最近所提出的索引模式，如VA-File, IQ-Tree, UB-Tree. 許多的實驗用來交互檢視所分析到的發現。最後我們對這結果下個結論並討論一些可能的效果改進方法。

Ubiquitous networking infrastructures have been an effective means to facilitate the information delivery in the last century. Using web browsers, ones can retrieve numerous multimedia documents from remote web sites with no need of physical attendance. As fast-increasing volumes of multimedia contents brought on line, the refinement of the retrievals becomes of great significance to keep a principal focus of browsing. Traditional databases successfully employ alphanumeric attributes to manage data based on the equality. To augment such index capability into the multimedia content, many multi-dimensional index structures were proposed for multimedia data management. In this thesis, we will survey the recent progress of these structures, and discuss the underlying rationale behind the designs. Particularly, we examine the challenges to organize the high-dimensional multimedia objects. For quality measures, we develop several cost models to evaluate the recently proposed schemes, VA-file, IQ-tree, and UB-tree. Several empirical studies are performed to cross-examine the analytical findings. Finally, we conclude the investigation and discuss an alternative approach for possible performance improvement.

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