  Space-filling curves can be used to organise points in the plane into
bounding-box hierarchies (such as R-trees). We develop measures of the
bounding-box quality of space-filling curves that express how effective
different space-filling curves are for this purpose. We give general lower
bounds on the bounding-box quality measures and on locality according to
Gotsman and Lindenbaum for a large class of space-filling curves. We describe a
generic algorithm to approximate these and similar quality measures for any
given curve. Using our algorithm we find good approximations of the locality
and the bounding-box quality of several known and new space-filling curves.
Surprisingly, some curves with relatively bad locality by Gotsman and
Lindenbaum's measure, have good bounding-box quality, while the curve with the
best-known locality has relatively bad bounding-box quality.
