Intuitively, an open set provides a method to distinguish two points. For example, if about one of two points in a topological space, there exists an open set not containing the other (distinct) point, the two points are referred to as topologically distinguishable. In this manner, one may speak of whether two points, or more generally two subsets, of a topological space are "near" without concretely defining a distance. Therefore, topological spaces may be seen as a generalization of spaces equipped with a notion of distance, which are called metric spaces.