REQDOC: closed worlds

Current wording:

Due to the size and rate of change on the Web, the closed-world assumption 
(which states that anything that cannot not be inferred is assumed to be 
false) is inappropriate. However, there are many situations where closed-world 
information would be useful. Therefore, the language must be able to specify 
when certain documents have complete information on certain topics. Examples 
might include the complete set of instances of a class or the complete set of 
members in a list.

Proposed Wording:


... two sentenced remain unchanged ...
Therefore, the language must be able to state that a given ontolog can be 
regarded as complete. This would then sanction additional inferences to be 
drawn from that ontology. The precise semantics of such a statement (and the 
corresponding set of inferences) remains to be defined, but examples might 
include assuming completeness of class-membership and assuming exhaustiveness 
of subclasses.

Comments:
1. I refer to Pat's email [1] for keeping this on board
2. I tried to make the issue clear while keeping the details open as much as 
possible (there is clearly work to be done here).

Frank.
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[1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-webont-wg/2002Feb/0098.html

Received on Monday, 25 February 2002 19:47:08 UTC