architecture Architecture is the art and technique of designing and building, as distinguished from the skills associated with construction. It is both the process and the product of sketching, conceiving, planning, designing, and constructing buildings ...

, visibility graph analysis (VGA) is a method of analysing the inter-visibility connections within buildings or urban networks. Visibility graph analysis was developed from the architectural theory of

space syntax The term space syntax encompasses a set of theories and techniques for the analysis of spatial configurations. It was conceived by Bill Hillier, Julienne Hanson, and colleagues at The Bartlett, University College London in the late 1970s to ear ...

by Turner et al. (2001), and is applied through the construction of a

visibility graph In computational geometry and robot motion planning, a visibility graph is a graph of intervisible locations, typically for a set of points and obstacles in the Euclidean plane. Each node in the graph represents a point location, and each edge rep ...

within the open space of a plan. Visibility graph analysis uses various measures from the theory of

small-world network A small-world network is a type of mathematical graph in which most nodes are not neighbors of one another, but the neighbors of any given node are likely to be neighbors of each other and most nodes can be reached from every other node by a sm ...

s and

centrality In graph theory and network analysis, indicators of centrality assign numbers or rankings to nodes within a graph corresponding to their network position. Applications include identifying the most influential person(s) in a social network, k ...

network theory Network theory is the study of graphs as a representation of either symmetric relations or asymmetric relations between discrete objects. In computer science and network science, network theory is a part of graph theory: a network can be de ...

in order to assess perceptual qualities of space and the possible usage of it. Visibility graph analysis was firstly implemented in Turner's Depthmap software and is now widely used by both academics and practitioners through the

open source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...

and

multi-platform In computing, cross-platform software (also called multi-platform software, platform-agnostic software, or platform-independent software) is computer software that is designed to work in several computing platforms. Some cross-platform software r ...

br>depthmapX
developed by Tasos Varoudis. Another

opensource Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized so ...

and

software that implements visibility graphs is topologicp

developed by Wassim Jabi.

References

* Architectural theory Geometric graph theory {{Combin-stub

See also

References