  We present a near linear time algorithm for constructing hierarchical nets in
finite metric spaces with constant doubling dimension. This data-structure is
then applied to obtain improved algorithms for the following problems:
Approximate nearest neighbor search, well-separated pair decomposition, compact
representation scheme, doubling measure, and computation of the (approximate)
Lipschitz constant of a function. In all cases, the running (preprocessing)
time is near-linear and the space being used is linear.
