Contact, closure, topology, and the linking of row and column types of relations

Forming closures of subsets of a set X is a technique that plays an important role in many scientific disciplines and there are many cryptomorphic mathematical structures that describe closures and their construction. One of them was introduced by Aumann in the year 1970 under the name contact relation. Using relation algebra, we generalize Aumann’s notion of a contact relation between X and its powerset 2X and that of a closure operation on 2X from powersets to general membership relations and their induced partial orders. We also investigate the relationship between contacts and closures in this general setting and present some applications. In particular, we investigate the connections between contacts, closures and topologies and use contacts to establish a one-to-one correspondence between the column intersections space and the row intersections space of arbitrary relations.