TITLE: Reference Request: Relative De Rham Cohomology
QUESTION [14 upvotes]: I'm looking for a book, article, or lecture notes that does basic cohomology theory from a relative point of view (including the Thom isomorphism, the excision theorem, Lefschetz duality, the Gysin sequence, etc.) and uses the de Rham model for relative cohomology.  
Bott and Tu does most of basic cohomology theory using the de Rham model and even has a brief section on how to define the relative de Rham groups, but they mostly avoid the relative groups when formulating and proving the main results.  Hatcher uses relative cohomology groups all over the place but doesn't really do anything with de Rham cohomology.  I've been trying to build a dictionary between these two languages but I've run into some trouble at various points and I was hoping that somebody else has sorted all of this out.

REPLY [6 votes]: If $N \subset M$ is a closed (meaning a closed subset, not a compact submanifold without boundary) submanifold, then the restriction map $\Omega^{\ast}(M) \to \Omega^{\ast}(N)$ is surjective. You can see this using local adapted charts and partitions of unity. Thus you can define the relative cohomology as the cohomology of the complex that is the kernel of the restriction map. This is, as far as I remember, the viewpoint in Jost "Riemannian Geometry and Geometric Analysis".