On symmetric neighborhood assignments

Abstract: In this paper, properties of symmetric neighborhood assignments are discussed. We show that in some results of Balogh and Gruenhage, the family of spherical neighborhoods in a metric space can be generalized to a symmetric open neighborhood assignments in any topology space. By a simple example, we answer a question raised by Hung negatively. We also discuss two questions raised by Nagata about metrization and symmetric neighborhood assignments. By giving new characterizations of strongly paracompact metrizable spaces and orthocompact Moore spaces respectively, we show that answer of the first question is negative, while the second question is undecidable under ZFC. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]