Among the goals of Knowledge Management we can cite the identification and capitalization of the know-how of companies in order to organize and disseminate them. This thesis proposes a heterogeneous and distributed knowledge management system, called OCEAN. Based on ontologies and multi-agents system, OCEAN aims to solve the problem of capitalization and reuse of multi-sources knowledge in order to assist business actors in the development process of mechanical products. The OCEAN system is based on a knowledge life cycle composed by four steps. This knowledge life cycle begins with the identification then extraction, validation and finishes with knowledge reuse. Each step is the goal of an organization of agents.The identification in OCEAN system consists in the definition of knowledge by a business expert with an ontology. Ontologies are used in our system to represent the knowledge, defined by the business expert, in a structured and formal way in order to be understandable by machines. Agents according to the ontology defined by business experts realize knowledge extraction in OCEAN automatically. Agents interact with professional softwares via web services. The result of this extraction is stored in an organizational memory (OM). Validation of knowledge in OCEAN relies on business actors that validate the knowledge of the OM in a semantic wiki. This wiki allows also the presentation of this knowledge to business actors in order to reuse, evaluate or evolve it. Previous works, integrated within OCEAN, inspires the knowledge reuse step. The four steps lifecycle discussed in this thesis has enabled us to achieve a system that can manage heterogeneous and distributed knowledge in an extended enterprise.
