  Rough set theory, a mathematical tool to deal with inexact or uncertain
knowledge in information systems, has originally described the indiscernibility
of elements by equivalence relations. Covering rough sets are a natural
extension of classical rough sets by relaxing the partitions arising from
equivalence relations to coverings. Recently, some topological concepts such as
neighborhood have been applied to covering rough sets. In this paper, we
further investigate the covering rough sets based on neighborhoods by
approximation operations. We show that the upper approximation based on
neighborhoods can be defined equivalently without using neighborhoods. To
analyze the coverings themselves, we introduce unary and composition operations
on coverings. A notion of homomorphismis provided to relate two covering
approximation spaces. We also examine the properties of approximations
preserved by the operations and homomorphisms, respectively.
