Common Knowledge
Common knowledge is when every agent in a group knows the meaning (UriSense) of a URI. And every agent knows that every other agent knows the meaning of that URI. And every agent knows that every other agent knows that every other agent knows that URI. And so on.
InternetStandards serve the purpose of PublicAnnouncements that are one way to create CommonKnowledge.
But what does it mean to know the sense of a symbol? Take the symbol JohnBlack. I know what it means. I intend for it to refer to me. But compare the difference between what it means to me, as a designator of myself, versus what it means to my boss, or the old man I ran into in the elevator the other day, or to my bank. What I know about it is very nearly infinately more than what my bank knows about it.
About any symbol there may be a set of facts that is common knowledge, and the rest is DistributedKnowledge. In a semantic web built on an electronic network, portions of the distributed knowledge may be AlgorithmicKnowledge, that is, an agent may know that it can compute all or a portion of the distributed knowledge about a symbol.
So what is a SenseRepresentation of the MinimumMeaningfulSense of a symbol.
Here is what RamanathanGuha says about this in
![[WWW]](/wiki/classic/img/moin-www.png){kind=small}
Object Coidentification on the Semantic Web:"It is in general very difficult to get a large number of players to agree on common vocabularies/names for a large number of objects. There are however some cases where this has succeeded. In particular, this works when one of the following holds:
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There is a clear ownership of each object by one of the providers and the owner assigns the name at the time the object is created. This is true for domain names, web pages and many kinds of information artifacts.
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The set of names is relatively small and use of these names is a neccesary condition for enabling some functionality. This is true for programmatic constructs such as the set of HTML tags and Windows APIs
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There is a dominant player controlling the vocabulary with all the other players having a strong economic incentive to use that vocabulary. A good example of this is Walmart’s supply chain integration system where Walmart simply dictates how any supplier communicates with it.
Unfortunately, when none of these conditions hold, getting everyone to use a common vocabulary has been difficult."
Guha discusses the related problem of CommunicatingReferences in another paper.
There are additional questions concerning SharedInterpretations between machines and between machines and humans.
