Grothendieck Topologies Are Extensional Presentations of the Form of Sieves

A Grothendieck topology on a category determines both a subform of covering sieves and a quotient form obtained by identifying locally equivalent sieves. We place these two constructions in a single short exact sequence. For this purpose we introduce distributivity forms: indexed meet-semilattices equipped with distinguished indexed joins over which finite indexed meets distribute, and a strong version in which these joins also satisfy Beck--Chevalley. Over a fixed base, the resulting categories have all small limits and have kernels and cokernels relative to the closed ideal of fibrewise constant-top morphisms. Their monomorphisms are the fibrewise injective morphisms, and their relative cokernels, together with the top-reflecting morphisms, form an orthogonal factorization system. Cokernels compose but need not be stable under pullback, whereas kernels need not compose. We call a short exact sequence with prescribed middle term an extensional presentation, and prove that Grothendieck topologies on a category are precisely the extensional presentations of its maximally distributive form of sieves. Further applications recover universal productive closure operators and Lawvere--Tierney topologies, functorial non-Archimedean group topologies, and functorial linear topologies on commutative rings.