The invention is directed towards method and apparatus for representing multidimensional data. Some embodiments of the invention provide a two-layered data structure to store multidimensional data tuples that are defined in a multidimensional data space. These embodiments initially divide the multidimensional data space into a number of data regions, and create a data structure to represent this division. For each data region, these embodiments then create a hierarchical data structure to store the data tuples within each region. In some of these embodiments, the multidimensional data tuples are spatial data tuples that represent spatial or geometric objects, such as points, lines, polygons, regions, surfaces, volumes, etc. For instance, some embodiments use the two-layered data structure of the invention to store data relating to geometric objects (such as rectangles) that represent interconnect lines of an IC in an IC design layout.