A system and method for uniformly describing space and frequency views of multi-dimensional lattice data, including regions, tilings and hierarchical decompositions of image, video, audio content, and time series data in space, time, frequency and resolution. The space and frequency view description scheme provides a way to specify regions in space, time, frequency and resolution in term of space and frequency views. This allows specification of concepts such as “half resolution”, “upper right quadrant” or “high pass band”, such as when referring to views of an image. The space and frequency view description scheme also provides for SFTilings comprising non-redundant sets of views and SFPartitionings which are SFTilings which completely cover the space, as well as SFHierarchical decompositions comprising hierarchies of SFViews where there are processing dependencies among views. The inventive system and method also provide a way to index these view, which is important in applications of progressive retrieval in which a client application can send requests for views of images stored at a server in terms of an index value. The space and frequency view description scheme handles the details concerning the access and relationship of views with different resolutions, spatial locations and sizes.