CONTENTS INTRODUCTION .................................................................................................................................................................................................. 5 I. INDEPENDENCE WITH RESPECT TO A GIVEN FAMILY OF MAPPINGS (GENERAL PROPERTIES) ............................................ 7 § 1. Notation and main definitions.................................................................................................................................................................... 7 § 2. Notions of independence defined by families of mappings (Q-independence).............................................................................. 9 § 3. Maximal families of mappings for a given independence.................................................................................................................... 13 § 4. Q-independent sets of generators (Q-bases)......................................................................................................................................... 17 § 5. Exchange of Q-independent sets.............................................................................................................................................................. 27 II. VARIOUS NOTIONS OF INDEPENDENCE IN ALGEBRAS AND LINEAR SPACES............................................................................. 29 § 6. Construction of some family of mappings .............................................................................................................................................. 29 § 7. Corollaries concerning v**-algebras and linear spaces....................................................................................................................... 31 III. THE INDEPENDENCE NOTIONS IN ABELIAN GROUPS AND QUASI-LINEAR ALGEBRAS............................................................ 33 § 8. $S_0$- and S-independence in abelian groups.................................................................................................................................... 33 § 9. The S-, $S_0-$, G-, and R-independence in quasi-linear algebras................................................................................................... 37 IV. VARIOUS NOTIONS OF INDEPENDENCE IN BOOLEAN ALGEBRAS AND SOME OF THEIR REDUCTS.................................... 46 § 10. Additional notations, and some known results.................................................................................................................................... 45 § 11. Various notions of independence in regular reducts of Boolean algebra....................................................................................... 47 REFERENCES...................................................................................................................................................................................................... 54