Equicontinuous foliated spaces (Q1038689)

\textit{P.~Molino} [in: Riemannian foliations. Progr. Math. 73. Boston-Basel: Birkhäuser (1988; Zbl 0633.53001)] showed that if \(M\) is a compact, connected manifold endowed with a Riemannian foliation, then there is a fiber bundle over \(M\) with compact fiber (the transverse orthonormal frame bundle), and with a foliation transverse to the fibers whose leaves are the holonomy covers of the leaves of \(M\), and that there is a group of automorphisms of this bundle which permutes the leaves. The concept of Riemannian foliation is easily formulated by saying that the holonomy pseudogroup is a pseudogroup of local isometries of a Riemannian manifold. In this paper, the authors analyze the more general concept of equicontinuous pseudogroup of homeomorphisms, which gives rise to the notion of equicontinuous foliated space. A locally compact Polish space \(X\) is said to have the structure of a foliated space if there is a collection \((U_i,\varphi_i)\) of charts, where \(\{U_i\}\) is a covering of \(X\) by open sets and the maps \(\varphi_i\) are homeomorphisms \(\varphi_i:U_i\to B_i\times Z_i\) for Polish spaces \(Z_i\) and open balls \(B_i\) in \(\mathbb R^n\). They show that equicontinuous foliated spaces have structural properties similar to those known for Riemannian foliations: the universal covers of their leaves are in the same quasi-isometry class, leaf closures are homogeneous spaces, and the holonomy pseudogroup is indeed given by local isometries.