Nearly metacompact spaces (Q1807579)

A space \(X\) is called nearly metacompact (resp. nearly meta-Lindelöf) provided that for every open cover \({\mathcal U}\) of \(X\) there is an open refinement \({\mathcal V}\) which is point-finite (resp. point-countable) on a dense subset of \(X\). The authors give many results and examples regarding these properties. For example, they show that every countably compact, nearly meta-Lindelöf \(T_3\)-space is compact, and they provide an example to show that this result fails for spaces which are only \(T_2\). They show that nearly metacompact spaces which are Fréchet (or radial, or lob) are meta-Lindelöf. They show that every space can be embedded as a closed subspace of a nearly metacompact space (a characteristic shared by the irreducible spaces), and they construct a nearly metacompact \(T_2\)-space which is not irreducible. It is a question whether such a space can be constructed to be regular.