A knowledge base is a kind of content management system that tries to capture an organization's knowledge by writing it down and making it explicit and manageable. In the last time Wikis have emerged as a lightweight alternative to knowledge bases, because the barrier of entering information is much lower, which leads to a higher amount of information actually stored and current.

A second approach to making the knowledge of an organization visible is the use of skill databases that do not try to extract the knowledge, but to localize it.