Spans of cospans

Daniel Cicala

We study spans of cospans in a category C and explain how to horizontally and vertically compose these. When C is a topos and the legs of the spans are monic, these two forms of composition satisfy the interchange law. In this case there is a bicategory of objects, cospans, and `monic-legged' spans of cospans in C. One motivation for this construction is an application to graph rewriting.

Keywords: spans, cospans, bicategory, graph rewriting, adhesive category, network theory

2010 MSC: 18D05,68Q42,90B10

Theory and Applications of Categories, Vol. 33, 2018, No. 6, pp 131-147.

Published 2018-01-31.

http://www.tac.mta.ca/tac/volumes/33/6/33-06.pdf

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