Merotopological Spaces

In this paper we introduce a new topological-type of structured set called merotopological space. The appropriate morphisms are defined and characterizations of the corresponding initial and final structures are given. The resulting category contains as fully embedded subcategories not only the category of topological spaces and continuous maps but also the category of merotopic spaces and uniformly continuous maps, and, a fortiori, the category of nearness spaces and the category of uniform spaces. A functorial completion is constructed for merotopological spaces using bunches. A problem that has remained long open in the setting of nearness spaces is to find an internal characterization of the epireflective hull of the topological spaces. We solve the analogue of this problem in the setting of merotopological spaces. Applications to the Wyler prime closed filter compactification and to Taimanov's extension theorem are given.