This work presents a way to associate a Grothendieck site structure to a category endowed with a unique factorisation system of its arrows. In particular this recovers the Zariski and Etale topologies and others related to Voevodsky's cd-structures. As unique factorisation systems are also frequent outside algebraic geometry, a construction applies to some new contexts, where it is related with known structures defined otherwise. The paper details algebraic geometrical situations and sketches only the other contexts.
Categories: math.AG math.CT