the associate with location 20 process the associate with location 20 process can store the association between location and spatial hierarchy identifiers in a variety of ways fig2 fig5 describes one way to generate a spatial hierarchy identifier the use of spatial hierarchy identifiers will improve the performance of location based processing because the identifiers include the path through a spatial hierarchy for the location or area represented by the identifier the specification that a spatial hierarchy identifier must include the path through a spatial hierarchy is important so that the computers assigned to different parts of the index can be determined efficiently a map is created that indicates which parts of the spatial hierarchy are managed by which computers the path indicated by the spatial hierarchy identifier is used to look up all of those computers in the map of the spatial hierarchy in the implementation of the map the address of the computers themselves may be used or a computer identifier of any sort or a messaging address queue or topic there are no constraints on how the computers are identified or the transport required the path specified in the spatial hierarchy identifier is essential for the distribution partitioning and load balancing of the location based indexing solution therefore associating spatial hierarchy.