The topological realization of a simplicial presheaf

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to define the topological realization of a simplicial presheaf and to prove (under appropriate conditions) that it is homotopy-invariant under Illusie weak equivalence. In particular this applies to the site of schemes over $Spec (\cc)$ with the etale or Zariski topologies. As an application we show how to calculate the topological realization of a Deligne-Mumford stack. At the end we speculate on how to extend this to the case of $n$-topoi.