Common Information, Matroid Representation, and Secret Sharing for Matroid Ports

Linear information and rank inequalities as, for instance, Ingleton inequality, are useful tools in information theory and matroid theory. Even though many such inequalities have been found, it seems that most of them remain undiscovered. Improved results have been obtained in recent works by using the properties from which they are derived instead of the inequalities themselves. We apply here this strategy to the classification of matroids according to their representations and to the search for bounds on secret sharing for matroid ports.