Lie groupoids as generalized atlases (Q867336)

In his own words, the author proposes ``to view a Lie groupoid as a generalized atlas for the `virtual structure' of its orbit space, the equivalence between atlases being being here by the smooth Morita equivalences.'' This point of view is not exactly new and, in some sense, goes back to Grothendieck. For example, one can mention \textit{I. Moerdijk} and \textit{D. A. Pronk} [K-Theory 12, No. 1, 3--21 (1997; Zbl 0883.22005)] approach to orbifolds as Morita equivalence classes of proper étale groupoids or the approach to differentiable stacks [see, e.g., \textit{K. Behrend} and \textit{P. Xu}, ``Differentiable stacks and gerbes'', \url{arXiv:math/0605694}]. The novelty here is that the author proposes an axiomatic approach, based on the notion of ``diptych'', introduced by him in the 1970's [see Cah. Topol. Géom. Différ. 16(1975), 301--306 (1976; Zbl 0329.18018)]. This is a way of formally encoding smoothness by keeping some elementary properties of embeddings and/or surjective submersions. This seems to lead to a unified theory, although in this paper no results are proved (the words ``theorem'' or ``proposition'' are absent from this long paper). Also, the reader should be aware that the paper contains references to several works (e.g., works by Frölicher, Souriau, Connes, Molino, MacKenzie, Ehresmann, Brown, Weinstein, Dazord, etc.) which are not included in the list of References, at the end of the paper.