Generalising the étale groupoid-complete pseudogroup correspondence (Q2237404)

The starting point of this article is a well known correspondence between étale groupoids and inverse semigroup actions. First, the bisections of an étale groupoid form an inverse semigroup, which acts naturally on its object space. Conversely, any action of an inverse semigroup on a topological space has an étale transformation groupoid or groupoid of germs. These two processes become inverses of each other if we restrict inverse semigroups to complete pseudogroups. For instance, the Haefliger groupoid that is important in the theory of foliations is constructed in this way from the pseudogroup of partial diffeomorphisms of~\(\mathbb{R}^n\). The correspondence between étale groupoids and inverse semigroup actions has been generalised and enhanced by several authors. This article studies an abstract and very categorical framework for such generalisations, generalising several previous results. Such a general approach helps to transfer the correspondence to other types of étale groupoids, where the object space is, say, a smooth manifold or the ringed space, describing an algebraic variety. Such groupoids may be treated as internal groupoids in some category~\(C\) such as the category of smooth manifolds. If this category is a join restriction category, then it contains analogues of partial homeomorphisms and local homeomorphisms. If the category has an extra property called local glueings, then there are correspondences between local homeomorphisms and sheaves, and between étale groupoids and complete pseudogroups internal to the category. Under these assumptions on the ambient category~\(C\), the authors construct an adjunction between the category of ``partite'' internal categories in~\(C\) with ``cofunctors'' as morphisms and the category of restriction categories with a restriction functor to~\(C\), with lax-commutative triangles as morphisms. This adjunction restricts to an equivalence of categories between certain subcategories. On the groupoid side, the subcategory is defined by the adjective ``étale'' and on the inverse semigroup side, the subcategory contains only the join restriction category over~\(C\) with a hyperconnected functor to~\(C\). This result goes beyond étale groupoids and inverse semigroup actions by partial homeomorphisms, by allowing source-étale categories with arrows that fail to be invertible and partial maps instead of partial homeomorphisms. The arrows between groupoids that occur naturally in this context are the cofunctors, not the functors. They go forwards on morphisms and backwards on objects. They have been given different names in the literature, such as comorphisms, algebraic morphisms, and Zakrzewski morphisms. The reviewer named them ``actors'' in [\textit{R. Meyer} and \textit{C. Zhu}, Theory Appl. Categ. 30, 1906--1998 (2015; Zbl 1330.18005)] because of another attractive characterisation of them. Namely, an actor or cofunctor \(G\to H\) for two groupoids \(G\) and \(H\) in~\(C\) is equivalent to a natural way to turn a \(G\)-action on an object of~\(C\) into an \(H\)-action on the same object of~\(C\).