Newsgroups: comp.ai
Path: cantaloupe.srv.cs.cmu.edu!rochester!cornell!travelers.mail.cornell.edu!news.kei.com!news.mathworks.com!usenet.eel.ufl.edu!news-feed-1.peachnet.edu!gatech!howland.reston.ans.net!cs.utexas.edu!convex!seas.smu.edu!chacko
From: chacko@seas.smu.edu (tom chacko)
Subject: Multiple Inheritance?
Message-ID: <1994Nov21.230206.8991@seas.smu.edu>
Sender: news@seas.smu.edu (USENET News System)
Nntp-Posting-Host: rapid_f.seas.smu.edu
Organization: SMU - School of Engineering & Applied Science - Dallas
Date: Mon, 21 Nov 1994 23:02:06 GMT
Lines: 35

I am interested in approaches to dealing with multiple inheritance. 
I have looked in a few of my AI textbooks and they usually don't 
discuss the issue too much. Where can I find some fairly detailed 
proposals for how to handle multiple inheritance? 

Let me provide a sample of the type of problem I'm interested
in. Suppose you have the following concept network:

            people
           /      \
       student   worker
         / \      / \
     Jane    Paul    Fred
 
(Just in case my diagram isn't clear:
people are students or workers
Jane is a student
Fred is a worker
Paul is both student and worker)

My idea is that given some sentences about Paul my system (as
yet undeveloped :) should be able to decide if Paul is more of a 
student or a worker. 

Paul goes to school full time and works at McDonalds part-time. 
(Paul is more like a student)

Paul takes night classes and is a VP at IBM. 
(Paul is more like a worker)

So if anyone knows of systems, approaches that deal with these
sorts of issues I'd be very interested to hear about them. 

Tom

