Mass transportation and rough curvature bounds for discrete spaces

We introduce and study rough (approximate) lower curvature bounds for discrete spaces and for graphs. This notion agrees with the one introduced in [J. Lott, C. Villani, Ricci curvature for metric-measure spaces via optimal transport, Ann. of Math. 169 (2009), in press] and [K.T. Sturm, On the geometry of metric measure spaces. I, Acta Math. 196 (2006) 65–131], in the sense that the metric measure space which is approximated by a sequence of discrete spaces with rough curvature ⩾K will have curvature ⩾K in the sense of [J. Lott, C. Villani, Ricci curvature for metric-measure spaces via optimal transport, Ann. of Math. 169 (2009), in press; K.T. Sturm, On the geometry of metric measure spaces. I, Acta Math. 196 (2006) 65–131]. Moreover, in the converse direction, discretizations of metric measure spaces with curvature ⩾K will have rough curvature ⩾K. We apply our results to concrete examples of homogeneous planar graphs.