Hypergraph categories (Q2001422)

\textit{Hypergraph categories} were rediscovered several times in several guises with several names, including well-supported compact closed categories, dgs-monoidal categories and dungeon categories. The resurgent nature of this notion comes from the reason that it has a lot of application, including automata theory, databases, circuits, graph rewriting and belief propagation, and besides, the standard definition is too involved and too ornate to grasp immediately. Here a \textit{hypergraph category} is a symmetric monoidal category in which every object is equipped with the structure of a special commutative Frobenius monoid obeying certain compatibility with the monoid product. The principal objective in this paper is to show precisely that a hypergraph category is simply a cospan-algebra, which is, roughly speaking, a lax monoidal from cospans to sets. It was demonstrated in [\textit{D. I. Spivak} et al., J. Pure Appl. Algebra 221, No. 8, 2064--2110 (2017; Zbl 1481.18024)] that the operad governing traced monoidal categories is the operad \(\mathbf{Cob}\) of oriented \(1\)-dimensional cobordisms. It is similarly shown in this paper that the operad governing hypergraph categories is \(\mathbf{Cospan}\), meaning informally that there is a one-to-one correspondence between the wiring diagrams interpretable in a hypergraph category \(\mathcal{H}\) and cospans labelled by the objects of \(\mathcal{H}\). The authors think of the cospan representation as an unbiased viewpoint on hypergraph categories, considering the category of cospan-algebras as a decategorification of the \(2\)-category \(\mathcal{H}yp\) of hypergraph categories, which is the first main result in this paper. The second main result in this paper is the isomorphism of \(1\)-categories \[ \mathbf{Hyp}_{\mathrm{OF}}=\int^{\Lambda\in\mathbf{Set}_{\text{Lis}\mathrm{t}}}\mathbf{Lax}\left( \mathbf{Cospan}_{\Lambda},\mathbf{Set}\right) \] where \(\mathrm{OF}\) stands for ``objectwise-free''.