Kombolcha Institute of Technology

College of Informatics
Department of Software Engineering
Section A
Software Agent
Assignment Title: Open World Assumption (OWA)

GROUP MEMBERS ID
1. Ahmed Yassin WOUR/0553/11
2. Mahmud Mohammed WOUR/1757/11
3. Abdurehman Eshetu WOUR/0925/11

4. Anware Ahmed WOUR/1060/11

5. Mohammed Aseffa WOUR/0702/11

6.Amir Ali WOUR/5021/11

7. Abdurehman Yimam WOUR/0923/11

Submitted to Yohanis(Msc)
 Open World Assumption (OWA)

The Open World Assumption (OWA) is the assumption that that what is not known to
be true or false might be true, or absence of information is interpreted as unknown
information, not as negative information. It assumes incomplete information about a
given state of affairs, i.e., there may be more relevant information than what is provided.
This is useful for describing knowledge in a way that is extensible and most commonly
used in Artificial Intelligence and throughout the life sciences. This is contrasted with
the Closed World Assumption.

Example

Take the sample data in Table 1 and a query: “Which alumni do not have a PhD?”, then under
the OWA, it cannot answer with “Peter” because it does not know if Peter also obtained a PhD:
Peter might have, but that has not been represented in the information system yet. To retrieve
“Peter” as answer to the above query, an axiom has to be added that states explicitly that Peter
does not have a PhD.

In a formal system of logic used for knowledge representation, the open-world

assumption is the assumption that the truth value of a statement may be true
irrespective of whether or not it is known to be true. It is the opposite of
the closed-world assumption, which holds that any statement that is true is also known
to be true. The Open World Assumption allows for a more flexible and robust
handling of knowledge, where the absence of information does not imply falsity.

Another example of the Open World Assumption can be seen in natural language
processing. When we encounter a sentence that contains an unfamiliar word, we do
not assume that the word does not exist or that the sentence is incorrect. Instead, we
leave the meaning of the word as unknown until we look it up in a dictionary or
obtain further information. This allows for a more flexible and robust handling of
language, where new words or concepts can be introduced and integrated into existing
knowledge.
 Negation as Failure (NaF)

Animal Can fly

Penguin No
Shark No
Hummingbird Yes

➢ Can pigs fly?

In CWA, because the table doesn’t contain this fact, we
assume false
In the OWA, unless we have a statement (or we can infer) “pigs
can/cannot fly” we return “don’t know”
▪ NaF - only false if “not(pigs can fly)”

Incomplete Information

➢ The OWA assumes incomplete information by default

➢ We can intentionally underspecify and allow others to reuse and extend
➢ eg All sharks liveInHabitat some WaterHabitat
➢ Are there fresh/seawater sharks?
➢ Do we care? Someone might
➢ It can be useful to reuse

Reuse is in OWA
➢ In OWL, we extend an ontology by adding statements. ie we can not take any
away.
➢ By only committing to an answer if there is a statement to back it up, OWL
remains monotonic
➢ if we extend an ontology, all existing true statements remain true

Unique Name Assumption (UNA)

If 2 things have different names (IDs) they are,by default, different.
CWA typically makes the UNA
✓ Useful for counting

OWA doesn’t make the UNA

✓ To allow later assertion that two things are the same or different (or this
 may be inferred).
✓ note: negation is required for distinctness.

Why the Open World?

➢ Underspecification
➢ abstract, nested and unnamed entities
➢ Easily reusable (and extendable)
➢ Good at knowledge level (Ontology)
➢ They naturally deal with incomplete information
➢ eg Domain knowledge (eg science) - where we don’t know all of the
answers yet.
➢ ‣ Inference???

Why not(Open World)?

➢ Paradigm shift
o Involves technology/experience catch up
➢ Some problems are inherently closed world (often those that
➢ we ask “which are not...” or have a finite number of elements)
o but is possible to close the open world (later)
➢ Dealing with defaults/exceptions
➢ CWA good at dealing with schema-data mapping
o integrity constraints, validation (parsing, form generation)
o Data structures are typically closed
➢ Meta-query
o What do we know???

Interpreting Knowledge

➢ Is there a speaker at tea/coffee?

➢ Are there going to be biscuits at this meeting?
Time activity speaker
9:00 Welcome Ahmed
9:05 Report summery Anwar
9:10 New visions for research Mohammed
9:50 Closed World Amir
Assumption
10:30 Open World Assumption Mahmud
 10:30-11:00 Tea/coffee
11:00 Make decision Abdurehman eshetu
11:30 close Abdurehma yimam

➢ Database says “No”

➢ OWA says “Don’t know” unless a blank is interpreted as “Activity and
not( hasSpeaker )”.

In summary, the Open World Assumption is a principle that assumes that what is not
known to be true or false might be true, and it is commonly used in knowledge
representation, databases, natural language processing, and formal systems of logic.
By allowing for the handling of incomplete and uncertain information, the OWA
provides a more flexible and extensible approach to handling knowledge in computer
systems.