Cech-De Rham theory for leaf spaces of foliations

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to present a ``Cech-De Rham'' model for the cohomology of leaf spaces. This model lends itself to the construction of characteristic classes (in the cohomology of classifying spaces) by explicit geometrical constructions which are immediate extensions of the standard constructions for manifolds. In particular we rediscover (and explain) the Thurston formula and the Bott formulas for cocycles on diffeomorphism groups. We also use the Cech-De Rham model to explicitly describe the relation between the cohomology of the classifying space, the basic cohomology, and the foliated cohomology of foliations.