Subclass

Subclass means "type of" in OpenSHA. More specifically, a subclass generally has (or "inherits") all the attributes of a parent class, but with others added as well.

For example, a Probabilistic Earthquake Rupture is simply an Earthquake Rupture with a Probability of occurrance added to the list of attributes.

This is not only conveneint for organizing our concepts and model components, but it also makes object-oriented computer code more efficient because attribute declarations do not have to be repeated in the subclasses.