Frame systems and inheritance systems

This paper applies inheritance theory to the problem of encoding hierarchically organized frame-like knowledge. Inheritance theory is concerned with characterizing the circumstances under which valid inferences can be computed efficiently in knowledge bases that contain exception-permitting default knowledge, where this knowledge can be organized hierarchically. We generalize Touretzky's inheritance theory [13] from its original domain of IS-A hierarchies to the more general domain of inferential hierarchies. The generalization is based on an abstraction of a frame called a knowledge packet. The resulting theory can more easily applied to frame-based languages.