Uniform universal covers of uniform spaces

We develop a generalized covering space theory for a class of uniform spaces called coverable spaces. Coverable spaces include all geodesic metric spaces, connected and locally pathwise connected compact topological spaces, in particular Peano continua, as well as more pathological spaces like the topologist's sine curve. The uniform universal cover of a coverable space is a kind of generalized cover with universal and lifting properties in the category of uniform spaces and uniformly continuous mappings. Associated with the uniform universal cover is a functorial uniform space invariant called the deck group, which is related to the classical fundamental group by a natural homomorphism. We obtain some specific results for one-dimensional spaces. (C) 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.