---
title: "Inheritance Comes of Age: Applying Nonmonotonic Techniques to Problems in Industry"
authors:
  - "Leora Morgenstern"
doi: ""
url: "https://ijcai.org/proceedings/1997/234"
pdf: "https://ijcai.org/proceedings/1997/0234.pdf"
venue: "Proceedings of the Fifteenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence"
year: 1997
pages: "1613-1620"
track: "Invited Speakers"
keywords:
---

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

Leora Morgenstern

*Proceedings of the Fifteenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence*, pages 1613-1620.

## Abstract

N onmonotonic 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.