Choiceless, pointless, but not useless: dualities for preframes (Q2471003)

Motivated by a variety of results from domain theory and topology such as the duality between continuous frames and locally compact sober spaces, Lawson duality of continuous domains, and the Hofmann-Mislove theorem about semilattices of compact sets, the author seeks a general framework for deducing results of this type in a point-free setting that avoids the necessity of using choice principles. For this purpose he introduces quasiframes, directed-complete meet-semilattices with top, and preframes, meet-continuous quasiframes. He shows that the locally compact well-filtered preframes are the continuous preframes, establishes some natural dualities for the involved categories, and obtains various characterizations of preframes having duality.