View-based explicit knowledge Original Research Article

In the information-based definition of knowledge, an agent is said to know α at a state s if α is true in all states that look the same as s to that agent. However, in systems where an agentʹs view of the system is partial, even if a state s′ may be logically indistinguishable from a state s, s′ may not be visible from s. For instance, in a distributed system, all global states in which the agentʹs local state does not change look the same to that agent but this set of global states may not be accessible because the agent may not even be aware of the existence of many agents in the network. We propose a logic of explicit knowledge built on agentsʹ views and show it to be decidable.