Synthetic description of a semiorder (Q1175797)

In an earlier study of minimal representations of semiorders, the author introduced a substructure of ``noses'' and ``hollows'' essentially describing the frontier between 0's and 1's in the incidence step matrix of a semiorder. In this paper, he shows that the ``noses'' and ``hollows'' provide a synthetic description of a semiorder that they determine completely. These results have computational implications since the amount of information used in the synthetic description is of the order of the cardinal of the set on which the semiorder is defined.