The articles in this part of this issue of the journal are a selection of the papers originally presented to the Fifth Workshop on Coalgebraic Methods in Computer Science. CMCS was held in April 2002, in Grenoble, France as a satellite conference of ETAPS. The conference proceedings were published in Electronic Notes in Theoretical Computer Science65 (1). There were fifteen contributed papers and two invited talks. Six papers were selected by the Program Committee after a meeting for consideration of this issue, and revised versions were then sent to referees. In consultation with them, I selected the four published here. Most of them were later revised, so, in general, the papers appearing here are improved versions of the conference versions.

By the Final Coalgebra Theorem of Aczel and Mendler, every endofunctor of the category of sets has a final coalgebra, which, however, may be a proper class. We generalise this to all ‘well-behaved’ categories ${\frak K}$. The role of the category of classes is played by a free cocompletion ${\frak K}^\infty$ of ${\frak K}$ under transfinite colimits, that is, colimits of ordinal-indexed chains. Every endofunctor $F$ of ${\frak K}$ has a canonical extension to an endofunctor $F^\infty$ of ${\frak K}^\infty$, which is proved to have a final coalgebra (and an initial algebra). Based on this, we prove a general solution theorem: for every endofunctor of a locally presentable category ${\frak K}$ all guarded equation-morphisms have unique solutions. The last result does not need the extension ${\frak K}^\infty$: the solutions are always found within the category ${\frak K}$.

This paper introduces guarded and strongly guarded monads as a unified model of a variety of different term algebras covering fundamental examples such as initial algebras, final coalgebras, rational terms and term graphs. We develop a general method for obtaining finitary guarded monads that allows us to define and prove properties of the rational and term graph monads. Furthermore, our treatment of rational equations extends the traditional approach to allow right-hand sides of equations to be infinite terms, term graphs or other such coalgebraic structures. As an application, we use these generalised rational equations to sketch part of the correctness of the term graph implementation of functional programming languages.

This paper studies coalgebras from the perspective of finite observations. We introduce the notion of finite step equivalence and a corresponding category with finite step equivalence-preserving morphisms. This category always has a final object, which generalises the canonical model construction from Kripke models to coalgebras. We then turn to logics whose formulae are invariant under finite step equivalence, which we call logics of rank $\omega$. For these logics, we use topological methods and give a characterisation of compact logics and definable classes of models.

We show that the category of coalgebras of a wide-pullback preserving endofunctor on a category of presheaves is itself a category of presheaves. This illustrates a connection between Jacobs' temporal logic of coalgebras and Ghilardi and Meloni's presheaf semantics for temporal modalities.

The spi calculus is an extension of the pi calculus with cryptographic primitives, which was designed for the verification of cryptographic protocols. Because of this extension, the naive adaptation of labelled bisimulations from the pi calculus is too strong to be useful for the purposes of verification. Instead, as a viable alternative, several ‘environment-sensitive’ bisimulations have been proposed. In this paper, we present a formal study of the differences between these bisimulations.

This paper studies fundamental connections between profunctors (that is, distributors, or bimodules), open maps and bisimulation. In particular, it proves that a colimit preserving functor between presheaf categories (corresponding to a profunctor) preserves open maps and open map bisimulation. Consequently, the composition of profunctors preserves open maps as 2-cells. A guiding idea is the view that profunctors, and colimit preserving functors, are linear maps in a model of classical linear logic. But profunctors, and colimit preserving functors, as linear maps, are too restrictive for many applications. This leads to a study of a range of pseudo-comonads and of how non-linear maps in their co-Kleisli bicategories preserve open maps and bisimulation. The pseudo-comonads considered are based on finite colimit completion, ‘lifting’, and indexed families. The paper includes an appendix summarising the key results on coends, left Kan extensions and the preservation of colimits. One motivation for this work is that it provides a mathematical framework for extending domain theory and denotational semantics of programming languages to the more intricate models, languages and equivalences found in concurrent computation, but the results are likely to have more general applicability because of the ubiquitous nature of profunctors.