Antonin Guttman

Timos Sellis, National Technical University of Athens, timos@dblab.ece.ntua.gr

[A. Guttman, "Rtrees: a dynamic index structure for spatial searching", in Proceedings of ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data, pp. 47--57, 1984]

It is clear that all of us have been influenced by a lot of papers throughout our academic careers. Since Rick asked me to identify only one of them, I could not pick any other paper but the one that influenced the largest part of my research, namely my work on spatial access methods. I was very lucky to meet Antonin Guttman during my PhD studies at Berkeley and had a good opportunity to discuss with him the properties of R-Trees. The reason why I liked this paper, when I first read it, is that it addressed a very important and difficult problem - indexing multidimensional spaces where no obvious sort order can be defined -and it suggested a nice, clean and elegant method to solve it. In my opinion, this work opened up a whole new area of research that led to many well known good data structures and algorithms, which have even been adopted by commercial systems. One can see 15 years later, papers still being published around improvements and application specific variations of R-Trees (in image, spatial and, temporal DBs, as well as in more "exotic'' areas like data warehouses), continuing a very interesting line of research that Antonin opened up with his paper in 1984.