In a globalizing economy, competitiveness means information and know-how rather than capital and physical assets. The function of knowledge management is therefore to allow organizations to leverage their information resources and knowledge assets by remembering and applying experience. An organization’s ability to compete on the market is increasingly seen as depending on the skills and knowledge of its employees, regarded as intellectual capital, and on its capacity to preserve and use as much as possible of this knowledge in knowledge-bases and expert-systems. However, knowledge evolves rapidly, due to the continuous changes of the business environment, and the useful life span of the organizational skills is decreasing, which means the survival and competitiveness of an organization is linked to its ability to produce and use knowledge as well as to include the results of the learning process in organizational competences and virtual products.

      Keywords: knowledge-base, competitiveness, learning organization, expert-systems, ontology