The geometric structural complexity of spatial objects does not render an intuitive distance metric on the data space that measures spatial proximity. However, such a metric provides a formal basis for analytical work in transformation-based multidimensional spatial access methods, including locality preservation of the underlying transformation and distance-based spatial queries. We study the Hausdorff distance metric on the space of multidimensional polytopes, and prove a tight relationship between the metric on the original space of k-dimensional hyperrectangles and the standard p-normed metric on the transform space of 2k-dimensional points under the corner transformation, which justifies the effectiveness of the transformation-based technique in preserving spatial locality. ?? 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.