On the construction of domains of formal balls for uniform spaces

In the spirit of the well-known constructions of Edalat and Heckmann for metric spaces, we endow the set of formal (closed) balls of a given uniform space with a structure of poset and prove several of its properties, which extend to the uniform framework the corresponding ones of metric spaces. In particular, to show under what conditions this poset is a dcpo we introduce and discuss a weak notion of uniform completeness. Some illustrative examples are also given.