A Local Formalization of Inheritance : Preliminary

Existing work on formalizing inheritance suuers from two signiicant drawbacks. On the one hand, the formalization is often nonlocal, in that the translation from the inheritance hierarchy into the relevant declarative language requires a complete examination of the topology of the graph being considered. On the other hand, the formalization frequently uses an inference technique or axiomatization that is carefully tailored to problems of this sort and cannot be applied outside of this very restricted area. In this paper we present a formalization that avoids these diiculties. It is local and relies on a very simple generalization of existing approaches to default reasoning. The generalization is based on a formalization of the notion of causality.