September 29, 2005

Don't Assume a Closed World

While digging around for description logics (as with OWL DL) vs. deductive databases (as with Datalog) material I found this lucid explanation of the Closed World Assumption:

I see it in a pragmatic way. When you’re in the open then the Open World Assumption is really, guess what, the only sane thing to do. You dont really give your apartment key to a stranger because googling him up found no pages where he/she was mentioned as a criminal.

(From Two Semantic Webs.)