Operadic categories and their skew monoidal categories of collections

Abstract

I describe a generalization of the notion of operadic category due to Batanin and Markl. For each such operadic category I describe a skew monoidal category of collections, such that a monoid in this skew monoidal category is precisely an operad over the operadic category. In fact I describe two skew monoidal categories with this property. The first has the feature that the operadic category can be recovered from the skew monoidal category of collections; the second has the feature that the right unit constraint is invertible. In the case of the operadic category S of finite sets and functions, for which an operad is just a symmetric operad in the usual sense, the first skew monoidal category has underlying category [N, Set], and the second is the usual monoidal category of collections [P, Set] with the substitution monoidal structure.