I think, it is worth to strees, that a classification of open manifolds does not follow from the classification of compact manifolds. Open surfaces were classified, but open 3-folds are not, their classification does not follow from the classification of compact ones at least at the present time. Let me just site two papers. Ricci flow on open 3-manifolds and positive scalar curvature. Laurent Bessi`eres, G´erard Besson and Sylvain Maillot. http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/1001/1001.1458v1.pdf Thanks to G. Perelman’s proof of W. Thurston’s Geometrisation Conjecture, the topological structure of compact 3-manifolds is now well understood in terms of the canonical geometric decomposition. The first step of this decomposition, which goes back to H. Kneser, consists in splitting such a manifold as a connected sum of prime 3-manifolds, i.e. 3-manifolds which are not nontrivial connected sums themselves. It has been known since early work of J. H. C.Whitehead [Whi35] that the topology of open 3-manifolds is much more complicated. Directly relevant to the present paper are counterexamples of P. Scott [ST89] and the third author [Mai08] which show that Kneser’s theorem fails to generalise to open manifolds, even if one allows infinite connected sums. The refference for the article of Maillot is the followning. Some open 3-manifolds and 3-orbifolds without locally finite canonical decompositions. http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/0802/0802.1438v2.pdf Here is the sitation Much of the theory of compact 3-manifolds relies on decompositions into canonical pieces, in particular the Kneser-Milnor prime decomposition [12, 16], and the Jaco-Shalen-Johannson characteristic splitting [10, 11]. These have led to important developments in group theory [22, 7, 9, 24], and form the background of W. Thurston’s geometrization conjecture, which has recently been proved by G. Perelman [19, 20, 21]. For open 3-manifolds, by contrast, there is not even a conjectural description of a general 3-manifold in terms of geometric ones. Such a description would be all the more useful that noncompact hyperbolic 3-manifolds are now increasingly well-understood, thanks in particular to the recent proofs of the ending lamination conjecture [17, 4] and the tameness conjecture [5, 1]. The goal of this paper is to present a series of examples which show that naive generalizations to open 3-manifolds of the canonical decomposition theorems of compact 3-manifold theory are false.