The inverse semigroup TE of isomorphisms of principal ideals of E onto principal ideals of E, where E is a semilattice, has been introduced and studied by Munn (1966, 1970). He showed that, for any inverse semigroup S with semilattice E, there is a representation of S by an inverse subsemigroup of TE. The Munn representation, however, is not always faithful. In this paper, the possibility is considered of enlarging the carrier set E of the Munn representation in order to obtain a faithful representation of S as an inverse subsemigroup of a structure resembling TE in many ways. A structure X is obtained by replacing each element of E by a set. Then X = ∪{Xe: e ∈ E}, where Xe, denotes some set, has a natural pre-order relation ≤ (where x ≤ y if and only if x ∈ Xe, y ∈ Xf and e ≦ f ) inherited from E such that if T = {(x, y)∈X × X;x ≤ y and y ≤ x} then X/T is isomorphic to E. Such a set X is referred to as a pre-semilattice with semilattice E. If Tx denotes the set of all isomorphisms of principal ideals of X onto principal ideals of X then Tx is an inverse semigroup. Basic properties of Tx are considered. It is shown that when X is locally uniform, that is, when |Xe| = |Xf|, for all e, f ∈ E, Tx may be described as a wreath product of a permutation group with TE.

The set s itself is a presemilattice with semilattice E with respect to the pre-order ≤ defined by a ≤ b if and only if a−1a ≦ b−1b. It is then shown that the Vagner-Preston representation embeds S as a full inverse subsemigroup of Ts. As an application of these concepts the following result is established. Let R and S be inverse semigroups and let θ1(θ2) be an isomorphism of a semilattice E onto the semilattice of R(S). Then there exists a locally uniform presemilattice W and embeddings ϕ1, ϕ2 of R and S, respectively, as full inverse subsemigroups of Tw such that (1) θ1ϕ1 = θ2ϕ2 and (2) (eθ1ϕ1, eθ2ϕ2) ∈ if and only if Ee is isomorphic to Ef.