Handling inheritance in a system integrating logic in objects.

The inheritance mechanism of SILO, a system integrating a many-sorted logic within an object-based framework, is presented. In order to be adequate for knowledge representation, it comprises two components, a hardwired and a user-definable. Due to use of typed (sorted) terms, a variety of specialisation types between logical formulas (axioms) are introduced and defined. Thus, the hardwired component is able to represent a variety of inheritance/specialisation relations between objects. The notion of a conflict is defined and conflict detection theorems are introduced. Also, consequence retraction is introduced and used alongside attribute/predicate overriding to resolve conflicts. The user-definable component consists of a number of user definable functions, called meta-functions, which are able to implement both global and local inheritance control. It is based on a partial reflection meta-level architecture.