Discrete realizations of contact and intersection graphs (extended abstract)

Known realizations of geometric representations of graphs, like contact, intersection, etc., are “continuous”, in the sense that the geometric objects are drawn in Euclidean space with real numbers as coordinates. In this paper, we initiate the study of dicrete versions of contact and intersection graphs and examine their relation to their continuous counterparts. The classes of graphs arising appear to have interesting properties and are thus interesting in their own right. We also study realizability, characterizations as well as intractability questions for the resulting new classes of graphs.