Let [Formula: see text] be an integral domain with quotient field [Formula: see text]. Call an overring [Formula: see text] of [Formula: see text] a subring of [Formula: see text] containing [Formula: see text] as a subring. A family [Formula: see text] of overrings of [Formula: see text] is called a defining family of [Formula: see text], if [Formula: see text]. Call an overring [Formula: see text] a sublocalization of [Formula: see text], if [Formula: see text] has a defining family consisting of rings of fractions of [Formula: see text]. Sublocalizations and their intersections exhibit interesting examples of semistar or star operations [D. D. Anderson, Star operations induced by overrings, Comm. Algebra 16 (1988) 2535–2553]. We show as a consequence of our work that domains that are locally finite intersections of Prüfer [Formula: see text]-multiplication (respectively, Mori) sublocalizations turn out to be Prüfer [Formula: see text]-multiplication domains (PvMDs) (respectively, Mori); in particular, for the Mori domain case, we reobtain a special case of Théorème 1 of [J. Querré, Intersections d’anneaux intègers, J. Algebra 43 (1976) 55–60] and Proposition 3.2 of [N. Dessagnes, Intersections d’anneaux de Mori — exemples, Port. Math. 44 (1987) 379–392]. We also show that, more than the finite character of the defining family, it is the finite character of the star operation induced by the defining family that causes the interesting results. As a particular case of this theory, we provide a purely algebraic approach for characterizing P vMDs as a subclass of the class of essential domains (see also Theorem 2.4 of [C. A. Finocchiaro and F. Tartarone, On a topological characterization of Prüfer [Formula: see text]-multiplication domains among essential domains, preprint (2014), arXiv:1410.4037]).
Some applications of Zorn's Lemma in algebra