Semantically sound inheritance for a formally defined frame language with defaults

  • Authors:
  • Robert Nado;Richard Fikes

  • Affiliations:
  • IntelliCorp, Mountain View, California;IntelliCorp, Mountain View, California

  • Venue:
  • AAAI'87 Proceedings of the sixth National conference on Artificial intelligence - Volume 2
  • Year:
  • 1987

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Abstract

Most frame languages either are glaringly deficient in their treatment of default information or do not represent it at all. This paper presents a formal description of a frame language that provides semantically sound facilities for representing default information and an efficient serial algorithm for inheriting default information down class-subclass and class-member hierarchies constructed in that language. We present the inheritance algorithm in two forms. In the first form, the algorithm provides justifications to a TMS, which then manages the inherited information. In the second form, the algorithm performs its own, special-purpose truth maintenance and therefore is useable in a system that does not include a general-purpose TMS.