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...

. Rational terms (possibly infinite terms with finitely many subterms) can be represented in a finite way via -terms, that is, terms over a signature extended with self-instantiation operators. For example, f ! = f(f(f(: : :))) can be represented as x :f(x) (or also as x :f(f(x)), f(x :f(x)), . . . ). Now, if we reduce a -term t to s via a rewriting rule using standard notions of the theory of Term Rewriting Systems, how are the rational terms corresponding to t and to s related? We answer to this question in a satisfactory way, resorting to the definition of infinite parallel rewriting proposed in [7]. We also provide a simple, algebraic description of -term rewriting through a variation of Meseguer's Rewriting Logic formalism. 1 Introduction Rational terms are possibly infinite terms with a finite set of subterms. They show up in a natural way in Theoretical Computer Science whenever some finite cyclic structures are of concern (for example data flow diagrams, cyclic te...