Experience shows that in geometric situations the separating ideal associated with two orderings of a ring measures the degree of tangency of the corresponding ultrafilters of semialgebraic sets. A related notion of separating ideals is introduced for pairs of valuations of a ring. The comparison of both types of separating ideals helps to understand how a point on a surface is approached by different half-branches of curves.

The notion of a real semigroup was introduced in [8] to provide a framework for the investigation of the theory of (diagonal) quadratic forms over commutative, unitary, semi-real rings. In this paper we introduce and study an outstanding class of such structures, that we call spectral real semigroups (SRS). Our main results are: (i) The existence of a natural functorial duality between the category of SRSs and that of hereditarily normal spectral spaces; (ii) Characterization of the SRSs as the...