High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! A spatial network is a network of spatial elements. In physical space (which typically includes urban or building space) spatial networks are derived from maps of open space within the urban context or building. One might think of the 'space map' as being the negative image of the standard map, with the open space cut out of the background buildings or walls. The space map is then broken into units; most simply, these might be road segments. The road segments (the nodes of the graph) can be linked into a network via their intersections (the edges of a graph). A common instance of a spatial network , the transportation network analysis, reverses this and treats the road segments as edges and the street intersections as nodes in the graph. More generally, the term 'spatial network' has come to be used to describe any network in which the links (or potential links) between nodes are constrained by the location of the nodes in some kind of 'space'. In this situation the topology of the network can be considered exogenous to the model.