{"ID":3050132,"CreatedAt":"2026-06-04T02:13:16.786527022Z","UpdatedAt":"2026-06-06T08:58:50.400332682Z","DeletedAt":null,"paper_url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.04676","arxiv_id":"2606.04676","title":"Indexicon: A Spatial Indexing Library","abstract":"Spatial indexing is foundational to Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and multi-dimensional data management, yet the current open-source landscape poses a significant barrier to research that employs or benchmarks spatial access methods. We observe that most of the existing open-source libraries include a single index. Some are hindered by complex dependencies, missing critical functionalities, inconsistent APIs, and rigid constraints regarding the support of spatial data types. To address this issue, we introduce Indexicon: a unified, highly portable, extendable, open-source spatial indexing library, designed specifically for rapid integration and ease of modification of main-memory spatial access methods. Indexicon provides a comprehensive suite of popular tree-based spatial access methods, including the R-tree, Quad-tree variants, and the KD-tree. Each structure is meticulously implemented as a self-contained, single-file, header-only C++ template with zero external dependencies beyond the standard library. Crucially, every index features a uniform interface, natively supporting bulk-loading, dynamic insertions/deletions, range queries, $k$-nearest neighbor ($k$NN) search, and structural statistics tracking. We also present an extensive performance evaluation of Indexicon against well-established and widely used implementations of these structures (including Boost Geometry, PCL, and Nanoflann) across six real-world geographic datasets. Our results demonstrate that Indexicon's lightweight design matches or outperforms existing state-of-the-art implementations while offering unmatched architectural flexibility. To foster reproducible spatial research, we open-source the complete library alongside our datasets and query workloads.","short_abstract":"Spatial indexing is foundational to Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and multi-dimensional data management, yet the current open-source landscape poses a significant barrier to research that employs or benchmarks spatial access methods. We observe that most of the existing open-source libraries include a single ind...","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.04676","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2606.04676v1","authors":"[\"Panagiotis Simatis\",\"Panagiotis Bouros\",\"Nikos Mamoulis\"]","published":"2026-06-03T10:00:41Z","proceeding":"cs.DB","tasks":"[\"cs.DB\",\"cs.CG\"]","methods":"[]","has_code":false}