Decorated cospan

# Decorated cospan

## Idea

Decorated cospans are a convenient formalism to deal with open networks, i.e. networks were some nodes are interpreted to be ‘inputs’ and some other to be ‘outputs’. In fact, a natural way to do such labelling is to specify some function assigning the set of inputs to those nodes in the network tasked with receiving them, and analogously, a function assigning to outputs those nodes which provide them. This is, morally, a cospan: the network is the vertex, and inputs and outputs are the feet. However, the two things sit in ‘different categories’: e.g., inputs and outputs may be sets of wires and sockets, while the network has a more complicated description. Nevertheless, the network is just a set of nodes with more information attached, namely the way those nodes are connected. The key insight here is that to specify inputs/outputs of the network, we don’t really care about this additional information. Hence we can use a ‘cospan of nodes’ (formally, a cospan in FinSet), and deal with the network structure later, as a decoration.

Surprisingly, this formalism naturally captures also other operations such as sequential and parallel composition of networks.

## Definition

### Categories of cospans

In a category $\mathbf C$ with finite colimits (or even just pushouts) cospans can be composed in a natural way. In fact, given $x \to s \leftarrow y$ and $y \to t \leftarrow z$, we get a new cospan $x \to p \leftarrow z$ by taking a pushout in the middle:

$\array{ &&&& s +_y t \\& && {}^{p_s}\nearrow && \nwarrow^{p_t} \\ && s &&&& t \\ & {}^{f}\nearrow && \nwarrow^{g} & & {}^{h}\nearrow && \nwarrow^{i} \\ x &&&& y &&&& z }$

Therefore cospans form a compositional structure: a category $\mathrm{Cospan}(\mathbf C)$ where objects are the same of $\mathbf C$ but morphisms from $x$ to $y$ are replaced by cospans with feet $x$ and $y$. Since the pushout we choose to form the composite of two cospans is, in general, unique only up to unique isomorphism, we actually need to define a $2$-category. Morphisms of cospans $(x \to p \leftarrow y) \Rightarrow (x \to q \leftarrow y)$ are given by any $\mathbf C$-morphism $\eta : p \to q$ making the following commute

$\array{ && p \\ & {}^{f}\nearrow && \nwarrow^{g} \\ x &&\downarrow^\eta&& z \\ & {}_{f'}\searrow && \swarrow_{g'} \\ && q }$

It is also customary to ignore the $2$-structure and simply work with $\mathrm{Cospan}(\mathbf C)$ as a $1$-category whose morphisms are isomorphism classes of cospans.

### Categories of decorated cospans

###### Definition

(B. Fong 2015) Let $\mathbf C$ be a category with finite colimits, and

$(F, \phi): (\mathbf C, +) \to (\mathbf D, \otimes)$

be a lax monoidal functor. A decorated cospan, or more precisely an $F$-decorated cospan, is a pair $(x \overset{i}\to n \overset{o}\leftarrow y,\, 1 \overset{s}\to Fn)$. We shall call the element $1 \overset{s}\to Fn$ the decoration of the decorated cospan. A morphism of decorated cospans

$f : (x \overset{i}\to n \overset{o}\leftarrow y,\, 1 \overset{s}\to Fn) \to (x \overset{i}\to n' \overset{o}\leftarrow y,\, 1 \overset{s'}\to Fn')$

is a morphism of cospans such that the following commutes:

$\array{ && Fn\\ & \nearrow^s\\ 1 & & \downarrow^{Ff}\\ & \searrow^{s'}\\ && Fn' }$
###### Definition

Given a cospan $x \to n \leftarrow y$ in $\mathbf C$, the empty decoration on $n$ is the unique map

$1 \overset{\phi_1}\longrightarrow F\varnothing \overset{F!}\longrightarrow Fn$

where $\varnothing$ is inital in $\mathbf C$ and $!$ denotes the universal morphism from such object.

###### Proposition

(B. Fong 2015) There is a category $F\mathrm{Cospan}$ of $F$-decorated cospans, with objects the objects of $\mathbf C$ and morphisms isomorphism classes od $F$-decorated cospans. Composition in this category is given by the class of the pushout of two representatives:

$\array{ &&&& n +_y m \\& && {}^{j_n}\nearrow && \nwarrow^{j_m} \\ && n &&&& m \\ & {}^{i_x}\nearrow && \nwarrow^{o_y} & & {}^{i_y}\nearrow && \nwarrow^{o_z} \\ x &&&& y &&&& z }$

along with the decoration

$1 \overset{\lambda^{-1}}\longrightarrow 1 \otimes 1 \overset{s \otimes s'}\longrightarrow Fn \otimes Fm \overset{\phi_{n,m}}\longrightarrow F(n+m) \overset{F[j_n,j_m]}\longrightarrow F(n +_y m).$

where $1 \overset{s}\to Fn$ and $1 \overset{s'}\to Fn$ are decorations of the first and second cospan, respectively.

###### Proof

The identity morphism of an object $x$ in $F\mathrm{Cospan}$ is simply $x \overset{\mathrm{id}}\to x \overset{\mathrm{id}}\leftarrow x$ equipped with the empty decoration on $x$. The check that all relevant axioms are satisfied can be found in (B. Fong 2015, Appendix A)

###### Remark

The composition of decorations is the key construction of the decorated cospans formalisms. In fact, returning to the analogy with open networks, it constructs the composite network of a given ‘link’ of two networks. Hence the compositional structures of the cospans is leveraged to describe the compositional structure of a richer structure.

###### Remark

Notice that the empty decoration gives a canonical way to decorate any cospan on $\mathbf C$. Indeed, it can be shown this defines a wide functor $\mathrm{Cospan}(\mathbf C) \embedsin F\mathrm{Cospan}$, as the composition of two empty-decorated cospans is again empty-decorated.

### The monoidal and hypergraph structures

In the presence of a braiding on $\mathbf D$ (the ‘decorating category’), the category of decorated cospans becomes not just symmetric monoidal, but a full-blown hypergraph category.

###### Theorem

(B. Fong, 2015) Let $\mathbf C$ be a category with finite colimts, $(\mathbf D, \otimes)$ a braided monoidal category and $(F, \phi) : (\mathbf C, +) \to (\mathbf D, \otimes)$ a lax braided monoidal functor. Then we may equip $F\mathrm{Cospan}$ with a symmetric monoidal and hypergraph structure, such that there is a wide embedding of hypergraph categories

$\mathrm{Cospan}(\mathbf C) \embedsin F\mathrm{Cospan}.$
###### Proof

We define the monoidal product of objects $x$ and $y$ of $F\mathrm{Cospan}$ to be their coproduct $x+y$ in $\mathbf C$, and defined the monoidal product of decorated cospans $(x \overset{i}\to n \overset{o}\leftarrow y, 1 \overset{s}\to Fn)$ and $(x \overset{i}\to n' \overset{o}\leftarrow y, 1 \overset{s'}\to Fn')$ to be

$\array{ && n + n' \\ & {}^{i_x + i_{x'}}\nearrow && \nwarrow^{o_y + o_{y'}} &&,&& 1 \overset{\lambda^{-1}}\longrightarrow 1 \otimes 1 \overset{s \otimes s'}\longrightarrow Fn \otimes Fn' \overset{\phi_{n,n'}}\longrightarrow F(n+n') \\ x+x' &&&& y+y' }$

The braiding in $\mathbf D$ can be now used to show this product is indeed functorial. Finally, we choose associator, unitors and braiding to be the images of those in $\mathrm{Cospan}(\mathbf C)$. The necessary checks are done in (B. Fong 2015, Appendix A).

The hypergraph structure is defined by equipping each object $x \in F\mathrm{Cospan}$ with the image of the special commutative Frobenius monoid specified by the hypergraph structure of $\mathrm{Cospan}(\mathbf C)$. The fact that the ‘empty-decoration’ embedding is an hypergraph functor is evident.

If the monoidal unit of $(\mathbf D, \otimes)$ is the inital object, then each object admits only a decoration — the empty one. This implies $\mathrm{Cospan}(\mathbf C)$ and $1_{\mathbf C}\mathrm{Cospan}$ are isomorphic as hypergraph categories.

## References

Decorated cospans were first defined by Brendan Fong:

Created on July 21, 2019 at 06:07:31. See the history of this page for a list of all contributions to it.