Graphoids: An Axiomatic Characterization of Graphical Representations

Two of the main reasons that graphs, networks, and diagrams offer useful representations for such a wide variety of phenomenare that they display vividly the dependencies that exist among objects in the domain and they distinguish direct from indirect dependencies. In reasoning applications, this distinction facilitates the identification of information items that have direct bearing on the task at hand and those that can be ignored, given what we already know.