In GraphQL what's the meaning of “edges” and “

I am consuming a particular GraphQL endpoint and although I am supplying a clean JSON structure as a query, when I get the results I get "edges" and "node" tags. It seems as if it is polluting my data with no obvious benefit. Why is it there and is it possible to get rid of those for faster and simpler parsing of data?

Let's Begin with a Short Introduction in simple words

GraphQl Relay specifications

mechanism for refetching an object
description of how to page through connections
structure around mutations to make them predictable

Connections:

a connection is a collection of objects with metadata such as edges, pageInfo...
pageInfo will contain hasNextPage, hasPreviousPage, startCursor, endCursor
- hasNextPage will tell us if there are more edges available, or if we’ve reached the end of this connection.
The array of records: edges
- edges will provide you flexibility to use your data(node)
- edges will help you for the pagination, There is graphql GraphQLList but with no functionality such as pagination, only with array of objects (data)
Each edge has
- a node: a record or a data
- a cursor: base64 encoded string to help relay with pagination

https://facebook.github.io/relay/graphql/connections.htm

Node:

each node will have a cursor
you can set the number of nodes you need to show using the relay connectionArgs(first, last, after, before)

Relay Pagination works as

Fetches all objects in the collection and return a slice based on the first/last x records, used thru connectionArgs
after/before are used to indicate to the GraphQL server the number of required slice (data) using cursor from the node

There are many more things to consider like nodeDefinitions, globalFieldId, nodeInterfaces

https://github.com/graphql/graphql-relay-js#object-identification