connection

A very important type of pattern that may be produced by line data is a branching tree of connected lines, where no closed loops are present (p. 152/see source for more).

How is it linked with other places? (p. 101); Natural or human-made link with another location (p. 268); Situation: connections (transportation, routes, corporation ties, political associations) between a place and other places (p. 273)

[A location] . . . holds all the connections between a particular place and other places, near and far. Those connections can be "natural" (slope, wind, riverflow, seed dispersal, animal migration, etc.) or human-nduced (trade, commuting, corporate control, family ties, political authority, etc.) (p. 183, see source for more)

Connection and linkage. Using principles such as nearest neighbor, proximity, similarity, etc., one can derive a concept of join or link; thus ideas of connection or linkage can be derived. Adapting principles such as minimizing pairwise distance and using single-link assumptions, connections can be made between members of distributions. To pursue connectivity globally, precise locational information is required. With less precision, interpoint distance measurements can become equivalent (i.e., become tied), and the simple elegance of single-link designs may break down.

Connectiveness. We may remove measures of distance and direction from a geographical study and speak of connection only. Some other words for this property of space are adjacency, contiguity, or simply relative position.  This is best thought of as a topological property of space. The properties of connectiveness may remain invariant under transformations which change direction and distance relations. A map of the United States may be stretched and twisted, but so long as each state remains connected with its neighbors, relative position does not change.