Abstract. On the Semantic Web ontologies are most commonly treated as artifacts created by knowledge engineers for a particular community. The task of the engineers is to forge a common understanding within the community and to formalize the agreements, prerequisites of reusing domain knowledge in information systems. However, the process of objectifying ontologies results in ontological drift over time (as the community and its understanding evolves independently of the agreement) and results in the loss of local views over the domain. Several authors have suggested emergent semantics as a solution [1]. The idea of emergent semantics is to define the ontology as an emergent feature of a system of autonomous agents acting in dynamic, open environments. Besides an agreement over the kind of environment in which emergence could be observed, there is little common ground in what emergence would constitute. We have proposed elsewhere that the first step towards emergent semantics