Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 January 2009
Some new concepts are introduced, in particular that of a unique factorization semilattice. Necessary and sufficient conditions are given for two principal ideals of the semilattice of idempotents of a free inverse monoid FIM(X) to be isomorphic and some properties of the Munn semigroup of E[FIM(X)] are obtained. Some results on the embedding of semilattices in E[FIM(X)] are also obtained.