It is well-known that a term rewriting system can be faithfully described by a cartesian 2-category, where horizontal arrows represent terms, and cells represent rewriting sequences. In this paper we propose a similar, original 2-categorical presentation for term graph rewriting. Building on a result presented in [8], which shows that term graphs over a given signature are in one-to-one correspondence with arrows of a gs-monoidal category freely generated from the signature, we associate with a term graph rewriting system a gs-monoidal 2-category, and show that cells faithfully represent its rewriting sequences. We exploit the categorical framework to relate term graph rewriting and term rewriting, since gs-monoidal (2-)categories can be regarded as "weak" cartesian (2-)categories, where certain (2-)naturality axioms have been dropped.

. We present a categorical characterisation of term graphs (i.e., finite, directed acyclic graphs labeled over a signature) that parallels the well-known characterisation of terms as arrows of the algebraic theory of a given signature (i.e., the free Cartesian category generated by it). In particular, we show that term graphs over a signature \Sigma are one-to-one with the arrows of the free gs-monoidal category generated by \Sigma. Such a category satisfies all the axioms for Cartesian categories but for the naturality of two transformations (the discharger ! and the duplicator r), providing in this way an abstract and clear relationship between terms and term graphs. In particular, the absence of the naturality of r and ! has a precise interpretation in terms of explicit sharing and of loss of implicit garbage collection, respectively. Keywords: algebraic theories, directed acyclic graphs, gs-monoidal categories, symmetric monoidal categories, term graphs. Mathematical Subject Clas...

Multi-algebras allow for the modeling of nondeterminism in an algebraic framework by interpreting operators as functions from individual arguments to sets of possible results. We propose a functorial presentation of various categories of multi-algebras and partial algebras, analogous to the classical presentation of algebras over a signature as cartesian functors from the algebraic theory over to Set. We introduce two dierent notions of theory over a signature, both having a structure weaker than cartesian, and we consider functors from them to Rel or Pfn, the categories of sets and relations or partial functions, respectively. Next we discuss how the functorial presentation provides guidelines for the choice of syntactical notions for a class of algebras, and as an application we argue that the natural generalization of usual terms are \conditioned terms" for partial algebras, and \term graphs" for multi-algebras. Contents 1 Introduction 2 2 A short recap on multi-algebras 4 3...