Applying the Closed World Assumption to SUMO-based Ontologies

In commonsense knowledge representation, the Open World Assumption is adopted as a general standard strategy for the design, construction and use of ontologies, e.g. in OWL. This strategy limits the inferencing capabilities of any system using these ontologies because non-asserted statements could be assumed to be alternatively true or false in different interpretations. In this paper, we investigate the application of the Closed World Assumption to enable a better exploitation of the structural knowledge encoded in a SUMO-based ontology. To that end, we explore three different Closed World Assumption formulations for subclass and disjoint relations in order to reduce the ambiguity of the knowledge encoded in first-order logic ontologies. We evaluate these formulations on a practical experimentation using a very large commonsense benchmark automatically obtained from the knowledge encoded in WordNet through its mapping to SUMO. The results show that the competency of the ontology improves more than 47 % when reasoning under the Closed World Assumption. As conclusion, applying the Closed World Assumption automatically to first-order logic ontologies reduces their expressed ambiguity and more commonsense questions can be answered.