Notions of boundaries for function spaces

Sibony and the author independently defined a higher order generalization of the usual Shilov boundary of a function algebra which yielded extensions of results about analytic structure from one dimension to several dimensions. Tonev later obtained an alternative characterization of this generalized Shilov boundary by looking at closed subsets of the spectrum whose image under the spectral mapping contains the topological boundary of the joint spectrum. In this note we define two related notions of what it means to be a higher order/higher dimensional boundary for a space of functions without requiring that the boundary be a closed set. We look at the relationships between these two boundaries, and in the process we obtain an alternative proof of Tonev's result. We look at some examples, and we show how the same concepts apply to convex sets and linear functions.