Inheritance Comes of Age: Applying Nonmonotonic Techniques to Problems in Industry

Nonmonotonic reasoning is virtually absent from industry and has been so since its inception; the result is that the field is becoming marginalized within AI. I argue that this is because researchers in the area focus exclusively on commonsense problems which are irrelevant to industry and because few efficient algorithms and/or tools have been developed. A sensible strategy is thus to focus on industry problems and to develop solutions within tractable subtheories of nonmonotonic logic. I examine one of the few examples of nonmonotonic reasoning in industry -- inheritance of business rules in the medical insurance domain -- and show how the paradigm of inheritance with exceptions can be extended to a broader and more powerful kind of nonmonotonic reasoning. Finally I discuss the underlying lessons that can be generalized to other industry problems.