In: Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vol. 1091; Proc. 17th International Conference in Application and Theory of Petri Nets (ICATPN'96), Osaka, Japan, pages 480-496. Springer-Verlag, June 1996.
Abstract: Traces play a major role in several models of concurrency. They arise out of `independence structures' which are sets with a symmetric, irreflexive relation. In this paper, independence structures are characterized as certain topological spaces. We show that these spaces are a universal construction known as `soberification', a topological generalization of the ideal completion construction in domain theory. We also show that there is a group action connected to this construction. Finally, generalizing the constructions in the first part of the paper, we define a new category of `labeled systems of posets'. This category includes labeled event structures as a full reflective subcategory, and has moreover a very straightforward notion of bisimulation which restricts on event structures to strong history-preserving bisimulation.
Keywords: partial order; independence relations; traces; topology; event structures; bisimulation.