Communicating and resolving entity references
  Statements about entities occur everywhere, from newspapers and web pages to
structured databases. Correlating references to entities across systems that
use different identifiers or names for them is a widespread problem. In this
paper, we show how shared knowledge between systems can be used to solve this
problem. We present "reference by description", a formal model for resolving
references. We provide some results on the conditions under which a randomly
chosen entity in one system can, with high probability, be mapped to the same
entity in a different system.
