http://www.it.uts.edu.au Although rectangular dualization has been studied for several years in the context of floorplanning problems, its descriptive power has not been fully exploited for graph representation. The main obstacle is that the computation of a rectangular dual of any planar biconnected graph requires a sequence of non-trivial steps, some of which are still under investigation. In particular, the most tricky issue is the optimal management of separating triangles, for which no existing algorithm runs in linear time. In this paper we present our advances in rectangular dualization and we show two applications that, while very different, explain better than others its role.