Abstract. A 4-directional orthogonal ray graph (4-DORG) is the intersection graph of horizontal and vertical rays. If the rays are only pointing into the positive x and y directions, the intersection graph is a 2-DORG. For 3-DORGs horizontal rays are unrestricted but vertical rays only use the positive direction. The recognition of 2-DORGs is known to be polynomial, they form a nice subclass of bipartite comparability graphs. The recognition problems for 3-DORGs and 4-DORGs, however, are open. Recently is has been shown that the recognition of unit grid intersection graphs, a superclass of 4-DORGs, is NP-complete. Suppose G is given with a partition {L, R, U, D} of its vertices and the question is whether G has a 4-DORG representation, where the four classes of the partition correspond to the four directions of rays. We show that this problem can be solved in polynomial time. For the proof we construct an auxiliary graph G with directed and undirected edges and show that G has a 4-DORG representation exactly when G has a transitive orientation respecting its directed edges. There is a gap in the proof of Theorem 1. We have not been able to fix itWith an independent approach, we show that if we are given a permutation π of the vertices of U but the partition {L, R} of V \ U is not given, then we can still efficiently check whether G has a 3-DORG representation. Here, π is the order of y-coordinates of endpoints of rays for U .