Paper detail

The Bicategory of Open Functors

We want to replace categories, functors and natural transformations by categories, open functors and open natural transformations. In analogy with open dynamical systems, the adjective open is added here to mean that some external information is taken into account. For the particular use of the authors, such an open functor is described by two components: a presheaf representing the possible external influences for each input, and a classical functor from the category of elements of this presheaf to the category of results. Considering the appropriate notion of composition then leads to a bicategory. This report describes this bicategory with as little auxiliary constructions as possible and gives all the details of all the proofs needed to establish the bicategory, as explicitly as possible. Subsequent reports will give other presentations of this bicategory and compare it to other existing constructions, e.g. spans, fibrations, pseudoadjunctions, Kleisli bicategories of pseudo-monads, and profunctors (or distributors).