Cover Schemes, Frame-Valued Sets and Their Potential Uses in Spacetime Physics

The immensely fruitful concept of Grothendieck topology or covering issued from the efforts of algebraic geometers to study "sheaf-like" objects defined on categories more general than the lattice of open sets on a topological space. In the present paper the covering concept - here called a cover scheme -is presented and developed in the simple case when the underlying category is a preordered set. The relationship between cover schemes, frames (complete Heyting algebras), Kripke models, and frame-valued set theory is discussed. Finally cover schemes and frame-valued set theory are applied in the context of Markopoulou's 1999 account of discrete spacetime as sets "evolving" over a causal set.