Graph products of right cancellative monoids

Our first main result shows that a graph product of right cancellative monoids is itself right cancellative. If each of the component monoids satisfies the condition that the intersection of two principal left ideals is either principal or empty, then so does the graph product. Our second main result gives a presentation for the inverse hull of such a graph product. We then specialise to the case of the inverse hulls of graph monoids, obtaining what we call polygraph monoids. Among other properties, we observe that polygraph monoids are F*-inverse. This follows from a general characterisation of those right cancellative monoids with inverse hulls that are F*-inverse.