Inheritance Processing and Conflicts in Structural Generalization Hierarchies

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 fields of Computer Science, with particular attention to inheritance processing and conflict handling.