Spatial indexing by attributes is performed on documents with no real spatial information, such as text or PDF documents. An attribute is associated with these documents to spatially reference them. This can be done in two ways:

1. Dynamic - spatial locations are assigned (or updated) to documents as a result of attribute changes.
2. Batch (spatial scan) - documents are batch processed and assigned a spatial location through the processed document's environment lookup table.

A spatial location can be assigned to a document through metadata rather than trying to extract native spatial information from the document. Generally, document metadata can be interpreted as spatial information. Associations are created between attribute values and spatial locations so that when the attribute is modified a spatial location can be assigned to the document. When this happens, the spatial location is inherited from another document (or folder) rather than created for this document.

Attribute values are associated to a spatial location via a lookup table that uses documents or folders as holders for the spatial location. These spatial objects are the owners of the spatial location that will be associated to other documents based on attribute values.

There is only one lookup table per environment. However, all environments do not need a lookup table. Only one attribute per environment can be used as a lookup value. Eligible attributes must have their properties set to Fixed and Limit to list. For a given attribute, all values might not have a corresponding document representing a spatial location.