In topology and related areas of mathematics, a quotient space (also called an identification space) is, intuitively speaking, the result of identifying or "gluing together" certain points of a given topological space. The points to be identified are specified by an equivalence relation. This is commonly done in order to construct new spaces from given ones. The quotient topology consists of all sets with an open preimage under the canonical projection map that maps each element to its equivalence class.