Some Direct Theories of Nonmonotonic Inheritance
John F. Horty · 1994
Abstract Inheritance systems were originally developed within artificial intelligence in response to the practical need for an efficient way of representing and accessing taxonomic information. These systems, along with network representations more generally, were first presented without any semantic analysis at all, or else only with a procedural semantics, according to which the meaning of the representations was supposed to be specified implicitly by the programs operating on them.