An axiomatic theory of normed modules via Riesz spaces

We introduce and study an axiomatic theory of $V$-normed $U$-modules, where $V$ is a Riesz space and $U$ is an $f$-algebra; the spaces $U$ and $V$ also have some additional structure and are required to satisfy a compatibility condition. Roughly speaking, a $V$-normed $U$-module is a module over $U$ that is endowed with a pointwise norm operator taking values in $V$. The aim of our approach is to develop a unified framework, which is tailored to the differential calculus on metric measure spaces, where as $U$ and $V$ one can take many different spaces of functions.