Decompositions of categories over posets and cohomology of categories (Q5929700)

Let \(F^\prime :{\mathcal D} \to {\mathcal C}at\) be a functor and \(\int_{\mathcal D}F^\prime \) be the Grothendieck construction on \(F\), i.e., the `homotopy colimit' of \(F\), with projection \(\pi_F : \int_{\mathcal D}F^\prime \to {\mathcal D}\). For every \(F :{\mathcal C} \to {\mathcal V}\) with \({\mathcal V}\) a poset, the author constructs a functor \({\mathcal C}_F : \text{sd } {\mathcal V} \to {\mathcal C}at\) with \(\text{sd }{\mathcal V}\), the barycentric subdivision of \({\mathcal V}\), and shows that there is a right cofinal functor \[ P_F : \int_{\text{sd }{\mathcal V}}{\mathcal C}_F \to {\mathcal C}. \] This key result is used to investigate cohomology groups and homotopy colimits of functors defined over \({\mathcal C}\) using the corresponding constructions associated to functors from \({\mathcal C}\) to posets. This is then used to investigate decomposition results for classifying spaces of certain classes of small categories.