Generating weakly triangulated graphs

We show that a graph is weakly triangulated, or weakly chordal, if and only if it can be generated by starling with a graph with no edges, and repeatedly adding an edge, so that the new edge is not the middle edge of any chordless path with four vertices. This is a corollary of results due to Sritharan and Spinrad, and Hayward, Hoang and Maffray, and a natural analog of a theorem due to Fulkerson and Gross, which states that a graph is triangulated, or chordal, if and only if it can be generated by starting with a graph with no vertices, and repeatedly adding a vertex, so that the new vertex is not the middle vertex of any chordless path with three vertices. Our result answers the question of whether there exists a composition scheme that generates exactly the class of weakly triangulated graphs. (C) 1996 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.