Sunday, February 09, 2003

There are no lies

Web Ontology Language (OWL) Guide Version 1.0 Finally got around to reading the latest version. Reading it reminded me of the metadata lies. "Consequently, OWL generally makes an open world assumption. That is, descriptions of resources are not confined to a single file or scope. While class C1 may be defined originally in ontology O1, it can be extended in other ontologies. The consequences of these additional propositions about C1 are monotonic. New information cannot retract previous information. New information can be contradictory, but facts and entailments can only be added, never deleted."

The "open world" view states that no knowledge can be falsified since we only have partial knowledge of the system. The closed world (XML, databases, etc.) assumes that what is in the system is complete and therefore true. Seth Russell's readings on monotomic reasoning provided some more useful information. Now which one is more naive?

No comments: