Dirichlet forms, Poincaré inequalities, and the Sobolev spaces of Korevaar and Schoen (Q1876617)

Dirichlet forms for maps between metric spaces were considered by \textit{J. Jost} [in Calc. Var. Partial Differ. Equ. 5, No. 1, 1--19 (1997; Zbl 0868.31009)]. A natural problem is to determine whether there is a Poincaré inequality for such maps and in particular Jost asked whether such an inequality would follow from the corresponding inequality for scalar-valued maps. The current authors considered the same question in [\textit{J. Heinonen}, \textit{P. Koskela}, \textit{N. Shanmugalingam} and \textit{J. T. Tyson}, J. Anal. Math. 85, 87--139 (2001; Zbl 1013.46023)] for Poincaré inequalities defined in terms of upper gradients. Here they show that the same techniques can be adapted to Dirichlet forms and thus answer Jost's question affirmatively. They also identify suitable conditions on the underlying space and on the Dirichlet form sufficient to guarrantee that it generates the same Sobolev space as the canonical Dirichlet form defined by \textit{N. J. Korevaar} and \textit{R. N. Schoen} [in Commun. Anal. Geom. 1, No. 4, 561--659 (1993; Zbl 0862.58004)].