R-full Schreier internal categories and their directions

Abstract

We introduce the notion of R-full Schreier internal category, which is the monoid analogue of the notion of aspherical abelian groupoid. We associate with every R-full Schreier internal category a direction, which is a Schreier split extension with commutative and cancellative kernel. We show that this association is functorial and that such functor is a product preserving cofibration. Thanks to these properties, we equip the connected components of the fibres of such functor with canonical commutative monoid structures. Using the equivalence between Schreier internal categories and crossed semimodules of monoids, we describe these commutative monoids in terms of crossed Schreier extensions.