Topogenous and nearness structures on categories (Q328636)

The theory of syntopogenous spaces was introduced by \textit{Á. Császár} [Fondements de la topologie générale. Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó (1960; Zbl 0091.35702)] with the aim to simultaneously generalise topological, uniform and proximity spaces. With a similar but more concrete goal, \textit{H. Herrlich} introduced nearness spaces in [General Topology Appl. 4, 191--212 (1974; Zbl 0288.54004)]. In the present paper, the authors introduce topogenous orders on a general category with the aim to establish a categorical framework that allows ``a more unified treatment of current research in closure, interior and neighbourhood operators in categories'', as well as an extension of the study of topological notions to the study of uniform topology, and related concepts as nearness, in an abstract category. They then use topogeneous orders to formulate syntopogenous and nearness structures on a category \(\mathcal C\), providing a first step in the categorical study of uniform topology. The setting is a category \(\mathcal C\) and a fixed class \(\mathcal M\) of monomorphisms in \(\mathcal C\) such that \(\mathcal C\) is \(\mathcal M\)-complete, that is, both pullbacks of \(\mathcal M\)-morphisms along \(\mathcal C\)-morphisms as well as arbitrary intersections of \(\mathcal M\)-morphisms exist and are again in \(\mathcal M\). A \textit{topogeneous order} on \(\mathcal C\) is a collection of relations \(\sqsubset_X\) (defined for objects \(X\) of \(\mathcal C\)) on the class \(\mathrm{sub}\,X:=\{m\in\mathcal{M}\mid \text{codomain of }m\text{ is }X\}\) of \(\mathcal M\)-subobjects of \(X\), satisfying suitable properties mimicking the properties of the order \(A\sqsubset B\equiv A\subseteq B^{\circ}\) in topological spaces. The class of all topogenous orders on \(\mathcal C\) ordered by inclusion is a complete lattice order isomorphic to the lattice of all neighbourhood operators on \(\mathcal C\) with respect to \(\mathcal M\). The ordered classes of all closure and interior operators on \(\mathcal C\) (with respect to \(\mathcal M\)) are easily described inside that complete lattice, in a symmetric way.