The cocycle condition for multi-pullbacks of algebras

Abstract: Take finitely many topological spaces and for each pair of these spaces choose a pair of corresponding closed subspaces that are identified by a homeomorpism. We note that this gluing procedure does not guarantee that the building pieces, or the gluings of some pieces, are embedded in the space obtained by putting together all given ingredients. Dually, we show that a certain sufficient condition, called the cocycle condition, is also necessary to guarantee sheaf-like properties of surjective multi-pullbacks of algebras with distributive lattices of ideals.