Dictionary Definition

subsume

1 contain or include; "This new system subsumes the old one"

2 consider (an instance of something) as part of a general rule or principle [syn: colligate]

User Contributed Dictionary

To take up into or under, as individual under species, species under genus, or particular under universal; to place (any one cognition) under another as belonging to it; to include or contain under something else.
- 1961: J. A. Philip. Mimesis in the Sophistês of Plato. In: Proceedings and Transactions of the American Philological Association 92. p. 453--468.
  
  no allusion is made to forms because Plato is subsuming under the class of productive crafts both divine and human imitation;
To consider an occourance as part of a principle or rule; to colligate

to place under another as belonging to it

Subsumption may refer to:

Subsumption, a minor premise in symbolic logic
The Liskov substitution principle in object-oriented programming
Subsumption architecture in robotics
a subsumption relation in category theory, semantic networks and linguistics, also known as a hyponym-hypernym relationship (Is-a); a given set A is said to subsume set B if B is a subset of A; in other words, all individuals from B are also in A, not excluding the possibility that other individuals are also in A. In other words, B is a subset of A. This can also be written as "A ⊇ B", pronounced "A subsumes B". The inverse relationship also holds true: "B ⊆ A", or "B is subsumed by A". For example, A can be all animals and B can be all cats.

subsume in German: Subsumtion