Internal Categorical Structures and Their Applications

Abstract

While surveying some internal categorical structures and their applications, it is shown that triangulations and internal groupoids can be unified as two different instances of the same common structure, namely a multi-link. A brief survey includes the categories of directed graphs, reflexive graphs, links, multi-links, triangulations, trigraphs, multiplicative graphs, groupoids, pregroupoids, internal categories, kites, directed kites and multiplicative kites. Most concepts are well-known, and all of them have appeared in print at least once. For example, a multiplicative directed kite has been used as a common generalization for an internal category and a pregroupoid. The scope of the notion of centralization for equivalence relations is widened into the context of digraphs while providing a new characterization of internal groupoids.

Keywords

• Mal’tsev category
• naturally Mal’tsev
• weakly Mal’tsev
• internal category
• internal groupoid
• multiplicative graph