Topology from enrichment: the curious case of partial metrics

Abstract

For any small quantaloid , there is a new quantaloid () of diagonals in . If is divisible then so is () (and vice versa), and then it is particularly interesting to compare categories enriched in with categories enriched in (). Taking Lawvere's quantale of extended positive real numbers as base quantale, -categories are generalised metric spaces, and ()-categories are generalised partial metric spaces, i.e.\ metric spaces in which self-distance need not be zero and with a suitably modified triangular inequality. We show how every small quantaloid-enriched category has a canonical closure operator on its set of objects: this makes for a functor from quantaloid-enriched categories to closure spaces. Under mild necessary-and-sufficient conditions on the base quantaloid, this functor lands in the category of topological spaces; and an involutive quantaloid is Cauchy-bilateral (a property discovered earlier in the context of distributive laws) if and only if the closure on any enriched category is identical to the closure on its symmetrisation. As this now applies to metric spaces and partial metric spaces alike, we demonstrate how these general categorical constructions produce the "correct" definitions of convergence and Cauchyness of sequences in generalised partial metric spaces. Finally we describe the Cauchy-completion, the Hausdorff contruction and exponentiability of a partial metric space, again by application of general quantaloid-enriched category theory.