1 Department of Computer Science Hong Kong University of Science and Technology Clearwater Bay, Hong Kong http://www.cs.ust.hk/faculty/dimitris/bio.html 2 Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering National Technical University of Athens Zographou, Athens, Greece dinos@dbnet.ntua.gr 3 Action AID INRIA Sophia Antipolis 06902 Sophia-Antipolis Cedex, France nikos@sophia.inria.fr Correspondence should be addressed to Dimitris Papadias, e-mail: dimitris@cs.ust.hk, tel: ++852-2358-6971, fax: ++852-2358-1477 On the Retrieval of Similar Configurations Dimitris Papadias 1 , Dinos Arkoumanis 2 , Nikos Karacapilidis 3 Technical Report HKUST-CS97-13 September 18, 1997