The proximity relations inherent in triangulations of geometric data c
an be exploited in the implementation of nearest-neighbour search proc
edures. This is relevant to applications such as terrain analysis, car
tography and robotics, in which triangulations may be used to model th
e spatial data. Here we describe neighbourhood search procedures withi
n constrained Delaunay triangulations of the vertices of linear object
s, for the queries of nearest object to an object and the nearest obje
ct to an arbitrary point. The procedures search locally from object ed
ges, or from a query point, to build triangulated regions that extend
from the source edge or point by a distance at least equal to that to
its nearest neighbouring feature. Several geographical datasets have b
een used to evaluate the procedures experimentally. Average numbers of
edge-edge distance calculations to find the nearest line feature edge
disjoint to another line feature edge ranged between 15 and 39 for th
e different datasets examined, while the average numbers of point-edge
distance calculations to determine the nearest edge to an arbitrary p
oint ranged between 7 and 35.