Inner characterizations of weakly compactly generated Banach spaces and their relatives

We give characterizations of weakly compactly generated spaces, their subspaces, Vasak spaces, weakly Lindelof determined spaces as well as several other classes of Banach spaces related to uniform Gateaux smoothness, in terms of the presence of a total subset of the space with some additional properties. In addition, we describe geometrically, when possible, these classes by means of suitable smoothness or rotundity of the norm. As a consequence, we get new, functional analytic proofs of several theorems on (uniform) Eberlein, Gul'ko and Talagrand compacta. (C) 2004 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.