This chain of nodes, from the curve to the revolve node to the surface, is called the surface’s construction history. The most important thing about construction history is that you can change it. You can reshape the curve, or change the attributes on the revolve node, and the resulting surface updates automatically.
Construction history is part of Maya’s dependency graph. While construction history refers to the history of actions that created the scene, the entire dependency graph refers to all connections (input and output) between nodes.