  The celebrated Erdos, Faber and Lovasz conjecture may be stated as follows:
Any linear hypergraph on v points has chromatic index at most v. We will
introduce the linear intersection number of a graph, and use this number to
give an alternative formulation of the conjecture. Finally, first results about
the linear intersection number will be proved. For example, we will determine
all graphs with maximal linear intersection number given the number of edges of
the graph.
