Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 November 2018
The concept of extending to a topological space X a continuous pseudometric defined on a subspace S of X has been shown to be very useful. This problem was first studied by Hausdorff for the metric case in 1930 [9]. Hausdorff showed that a continuous metric on a closed subset of a metric space can be extended to a continuous metric on the whole space. Bing [4] and Arens [3] rediscovered this result independently. Recently, Shapiro [15] and Alo and Shapiro [1] studied various embeddings. It has been shown that extending pseudometrics can be characterized in terms of extending refinements of various types of open covers. In this paper we continue our study of extending pseudometrics. First we show that extending pseudometrics can be characterized in terms of σ-locally finite and σ-discrete covers. We then investigate when can certain types of covers be extended.