Representation of integral quantales by tolerances

The central result of the paper claims that every integral quantale \(\mathbf {Q}\) has a natural embedding into the quantale of complete tolerances on the underlying lattice of \(\mathbf {Q}\). As an application, we show that the underlying lattice of any finite integral quantale is distributive in 1 and dually pseudocomplemented. Besides, we exhibit relationships between several earlier results. In particular, we give an alternative approach to Valentini’s ordered sets and show how the ordered sets are related to tolerances.