Output details
11 - Computer Science and Informatics
University of Southampton
Being Van Kampen is a universal property
Significance of output:
<10>The mathematical concepts of extensive, regular and adhesive categories have been widely used and studied, with hundreds of publications and thousands of citations. In computer science they have found several important applications, for instance in formal semantics, and graph rewriting.
The results in this paper are the first that unify all of the above concepts, as well as other, lesser studied classes: the axioms of extensive categories, adhesive categories and regular categories are shown to be instances of the Van Kampen colimits, that we introduce. Van Kampen colimits satisfy the universal property of bicolimits in the bicategory of spans.