---
title: "The Logic of Inheritance in Frame Systems"
authors:
  - "Gerhard Brewka"
doi: ""
url: "https://ijcai.org/proceedings/1987/95"
pdf: "https://ijcai.org/proceedings/1987/0095.pdf"
venue: "Proceedings of the Tenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence"
year: 1987
pages: "483-487"
track: "Knowledge Representation"
keywords:
---

# The Logic of Inheritance in Frame Systems

Gerhard Brewka

*Proceedings of the Tenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence*, pages 483-487.

## Abstract

This paper shows how the semantics of frames with exceptions can be described logically. We define a simple (purely declarative) frame language allowing for multiple inheritance and meta classes (i.e. the instances of a class may be classes themselves). Expressions of this language are translated into first order formulas. Circumscription of a certain predicate in the resulting theory yields the desired semantics. Our approach allows the intuition that subclasses should override superclasses to be represented in a very natural way .