An approach to reference in communication between cooperating autonomous systems

The authors discuss an approach to reference that allows agents with little knowledge of each other and different partial views of the world to communicate. The approach suggests that agents need not agree on the actual entity that will be the referent to reach the level of agreement needed for useful communication. Instead, agents can agree on the attributes of the entity that are included in a communicated description and agree to disagree about the rest. This requires that a separate data structure be used to store the references and that future references to an entity assume only the attributes noted in that data structure