Spatial network analysis software
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Spatial network analysis software are computer tools used to prepare various graph-based analysis of spatial networks. They stem from the research field of space syntax in the domain of architecture, although they can now be used to analyse road networks over an entire continent.
As the domain of space syntax has expanded, there are now a plethora of tools associated with it. Since most were developed within the academic community, most tend to be free for academic use, and some are open source.
In historical order:
- Axman The (near) original developed by Nick Sheep Dalton of UCL to perform axial line analysis on computers running Mac OS, currently used in more than 50 countries. This spawned many offshoots such as Pesh (for the analysis of convex space networks) and SpaceBox (for the analysis of 'all-line' axial maps).
- Spatialist Developed at Georgia Institute of Technology to implement theoretical innovations principally introduced by John Peponis, this software is plugs into the MicroStation CAD package to analyse networks of automatically generated 'e-spaces' and 's-spaces'.
- Axwoman, written by Bin Jiang while at UCL, is a tool to perform axial analysis as a plug-in to ESRI products.
- Depthmap Developed by Alasdair Turner of UCL, this software was first developed to generate isovists and perform visibility graph analysis of building systems on computers running Windows, but now includes the automatic generation of axial line networks and analysis of axial line networks and road segment line networks at anything up to the level of the USA or Europe.
- OmniVista Developed by Nick Sheep Dalton and Ruth Conroy Dalton to perform a range of isovist measures on Mac OS computers.
- Fathom, a commercial implementation of visibility graph analysis written by the Intelligent Space Partnership.
- Mindwalk Developed by Lucas Figueiredo, This software performs spatial analysis over standard axial maps and new continuity maps. It is written in Java and runs on several platforms. Also known as xSpace, Mindwalk has been used as a research and teaching tool at several institutions since 2002 and now it is being distributed worldwide for academic and non-commercial purposes.
- Isovist Analyst by Sanjay Rana while at UCL, this program creates isovists from building plans as a plug-in to ESRI products.
- Ajanachara. Open source software developed by Gerald Franz at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics to perform visibility graph analysis of 3D Studio Max and VRML models.
- Webmap Also developed by Nick Sheep Dalton at UCL, this software is free to use (although it requires registration), and allows users to analyse axial maps through a web browser interface.
- Confeego Developed by the commercial company Space Syntax Limited, but available free for academic use, this software plugs directly into MapInfo to analyse line axial networks.
- AJAX by Mike Batty of UCL, performs both traditional axial network analysis (Batty calls this the primal analysis), and point-based visibility analysis introduced by Bin Jiang (which Batty calls the dual analysis). In a recent paper, Batty shows the elegant mathematical relationship between the two analyses.
- OverView plug-in to AutoCad by Christian Derix for Aedas Architects in collaboration with the Center for Evolutionary Computing in Architecture CECA. Allows architects to do quick visual integration mapping via isovist analysis on their projects. Contains also the possibility to analyse non-planar environments to take volumes and hilly sites into account.
- AXess 1.0 by Jennifer Brisbane at the City University of New York. A context menu tool for ArcGIS 9.x that calculates connectivity, control, mean depth, global integration, and local integration for all nodes in an axial line layer. Free download available at ESRI ArcScripts.
