Inheritance Processing and Con icts in Structural Generalization Hierarchies ANNA FORMICA AND MICHELE MISSIKOFF IASI-CNR Categories and Subject Descriptors: D.2.1 [Software Engineering]: Requirements/Speci cations Methodologies; I.2.4 [Arti cial Intelligence]: Knowledge Representation Formalisms and Methods General Terms: Design, Languages, Veri cation Additional Key Words and Phrases: Generalization hierarchies, structural conceptual modeling, inheritance, subsumption, subtyping, subclassing 1. INTRODUCTION The task of creating concepts and organizing them in generalization hierarchies constitutes an integral part of the mental operations that help humans organize their thoughts. In Computer Science, these operations are used by analysts and designers to observe reality, study complex problems, and construct conceptual models of the problem domain, aiming at the development of computer applications. In this article, we analyze, with a tutorial approach, how structural generalization hierarchies have been investigated in different elds of Computer Science, with particular attention to inheritance processing and con ict handling. 1.1. Generalization Hierarchies Generalization and its inverse: specialization hierarchies have been widely studied and applied in many elds of Computer Science. Their systematic introduction can be traced back to the 60s, with Semantic Networks [Quillian 1968; Sowa 1991], in Arti cial Intelligence, and Simula [Dahl and Nygaard 1966], in Programming Languages. With the
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