D-semigroups and constellations

Abstract

In a result generalising the Ehresmann–Schein–Nambooripad Theorem relating inverse semigroups to inductive groupoids, Lawson has shown that Ehresmann semigroups correspond to certain types of ordered (small) categories he calls Ehresmann categories. An important special case of this is the correspondence between two-sided restriction semigroups and what Lawson calls inductive categories. Gould and Hollings obtained a one-sided version of this last result, by establishing a similar correspondence between left restriction semigroups and certain ordered partial algebras they call inductive constellations (a general constellation is a one-sided generalisation of a category). We put this one-sided correspondence into a rather broader setting, at its most general involving left congruence D-semigroups (which need not satisfy any semiadequacy condition) and what we call co-restriction constellations, a finitely axiomatized class of partial algebras. There are ordered and unordered versions of our results. Two special cases have particular interest. One is that the class of left Ehresmann semigroups (the natural one-sided versions of Lawson’s Ehresmann semigroups) corresponds to the class of co-restriction constellations satisfying a suitable semiadequacy condition. The other is that the class of ordered left Ehresmann semigroups (which generalise left restriction semigroups and for which semigroups of binary relations equipped with domain operation and the inclusion order are important examples) corresponds to a class of ordered constellations defined by a straightforward weakening of the inductive constellation axioms.