On global singularities of Sobolev mappings

We define various invariants for Sobolev mappings defined between manifolds which are stable under perturbation with respect to the strong Sobolev topology. We show that these invariants classify various types of ``global singularities" of Sobolev maps. These invariants are used to give a simple characterization of the strong closure of the set of smooth maps in the Sobolev space.