Span composition using fake pullbacks

Abstract

The construction of a category of spans can be made in some categories $\CC$ which do not have pullbacks in the traditional sense. The PROP for monoids is a good example of such a $\CC$. The 2012 book concerning homological algebra by Marco Grandis gives the proof of associativity of relations in a Puppe-exact category based on a 1967 paper of M.\v{S}. Calenko. The proof here is a restructuring of that proof in the spirit of the first sentence of this Abstract. We observe that these relations are spans of EM-spans and that EM-spans admit fake pullbacks so that spans of EM-spans compose. Our setting is more general than Puppe-exact categories.