Any regular space decomposition can be described in terms of a space-filling curve. However, there is little benefit in doing so in practice so you rarely see i

Any regular space decomposition can be described in terms of a space-filling curve. However, there is little benefit in doing so in practice so you rarely see it expressed that way. They were briefly used by major database vendors 30+ years ago for indexing on the theory that it could mitigate head seek latency on spinning disk, hence the use of Hilbert curves, but were quickly abandoned without much fanfare because they have a lot of issues for this use case. If you were going to use them today, not that I would recommend it, Morton curves are generally optimal. While space-filling curves are not useful for compression per se, they are commonly used in some data compression algorithms to convert multi-dimensional data structures (e.g. rasters) into a 1-dimensional byte stream for the compressor.