Talk:Open-world assumption

Great page! —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Brainhell (talk • contribs) 01:45, 2 February 2006 (UTC)

Recommend move to Computer Science
Maybe this article should be moved to the computer science section. From its content and application, the subject belongs more to computer science, even though it deals with a concept also related to philosophy. Johann.Uhrmann (talk) 08:52, 15 June 2012 (UTC)

Incredibly stupid example
Such an incredibly dumb example. Whether Mary is a citizen of France has NOTHING to do with whether Paul is a citizen of France, in either "closed world" or "open world". Even is they were siblings or married, that would just change the probability. 71.217.109.79 (talk) 19:49, 24 June 2014 (UTC)

Agreed. Also what has SQL got to do with any of this? 79.79.165.109 (talk) 22:15, 13 August 2014 (UTC)

The open-world assumption is not an assumption
Describing the open-world assumption as an assumption is misleading. Imagine we are not making any assumption. We are presented with the fact that Mary is a French citizen and she knows Paul. Now, having made no assumption, we cannot say much about Paul, except that Mary knows him. We do not know whether Paul is a citizen of France, whether he likes sushis, etc. He may not even be a human being. But let us make an assumption, so we can draw conclusions. Let us make the... open-world assumption! By the wikipedia definition, we can now assume that the truth value of "Paul being French" may be true or false! Great, this is totally more interesting than if we did not make this assumption!

To be clear, the previous sentences are being sarcastic: we do not gain anything by assuming open-world. "Open-world assumption" is a term that has been invented to denote the absence of a closed-world assumption, when computer systems started making use of such assumption so much that it was necessary to have an explicit way to refer to those systems that did not. This is supported by the analysis of the use of the two phrases in English literature: Ngram viewer comparing "open-world assumption" to "closed-world assumption" until 1985.

The open-world assumption is like the "possibly-empty-set assumption": the assumption that a set of which we do not know anything about may contain elements, regardless of whether we know there are elements in the set of not. Id est, just an absence of assumption. Monsieur AZ (talk) 10:29, 20 November 2019 (UTC)

Remove 'Scare Banner'
This entry is completely reasonable. More could be added; points could be clarified; but these are universal comments that can be applied to most topic pages.

I recommend to remove the banner. If there are issues or gaps, those with those viewpoints should edit the page according to defensible modifications.

Mkbergman (talk) 05:29, 2 December 2022 (UTC)