The probabilistic powerdomain for stably compact spaces

This paper reviews the one-to-one correspondence between stably compact spaces (a topological concept covering most classes of semantic domains) and compact ordered Hausdorff spaces. The correspondence is extended to certain classes of real-valued functions on these spaces. This is the basis for transferring methods and results from functional analysis to the non-Hausdorff setting. As an application of this, the Riesz Representation Theorem is used for a straightforward proof of the (known) fact that every valuation on a stably compact space extends uniquely to a Radon measure on the Borel algebra of the corresponding compact Hausdorff space. The view of valuations and measures as certain linear functionals on function spaces suggests considering a weak topology for the space of all valuations. If these are restricted to the probabilistic or sub-probabilistic case, then another stably compact space is obtained. The corresponding compact ordered space can be viewed as the set of (probability or sub-probability) measures together with their natural weak topology. (C) 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.