
## 1. Introduction

Virtually all events in life are time-stamped. In other words, there is time associated with every situation be it task, process, event etc. As essential as knowledge is so is the temporal properties in any given context. The problem of representing knowledge and temporal reasoning arise in a wide range of disciplines, including Computer science, Medical Science, Philosophy, Psychology and Linguistics. In the field of Artificial Intelligence
(AI), a branch of Computer Science: temporal properties (time point, interval, etc.) on facts, events and processes are important for certain activities like planning, prediction and management of such processes (McDermott, 1982; Allen, 1984). We believe that reasoning about temporal properties of knowledge in knowledge management system, in the context of Economic Intelligence (EI) would enhance the efficiency of such stem. Also in the course of applying stored knowledge to a new problem case, such type of knowledge exploitation, can guide the plan of resolution of the new problem. In our work, we consider the two main categories of knowledge - explicit and tacit knowledge. Explicit knowledge comprises the documents, events, procedures etc. while actor's skill or know-how, understanding, observation etc. constitute tacit knowledge.

These knowledge could be elicited for representation and modeling. The two main concepts of this paper are economic intelligence and temporal reasoning. EI can be defined, at the level of a particular enterprise, as the decision-maker's capacity to exploit the knowledge and the new experiences, while reinvesting those already acquired, in order to solve at best a new decision problem (Kislin, et al., 2002).

We observe that there are existing works as regards reasoning about temporal properties of knowledge. McDermott (1982) propounds reasoning based on time points of event or fact. The reasoning formalism in the work of Allen (1984) is based on the interval between events. Our focus differs from theirs due to the fact that we concentrate on knowledge management: that is, representing, organizing and storing of knowledge of a given project for future exploitation in the context of EI.

## 1.1Structure Of The Paper

The paper is introduced in section one. A concise review of concepts of knowledge, Knowledge Management, Economic Intelligence and temporal reasoning including an evaluation of the features of existing systems that applies temporal reasoning as well as Knowledge Management systems are presented in section two. Our approach of reasoning on temporal properties in the exploitation of knowledge of projects in the context of Economic Intelligence is the focus of section three. Section four presents the architecture for representation of knowledge resource involved in decision-problem resolution in the context of EI. The paper is concluded in the last section with a summary.

## 2. Theoretical Background

We examine here the basic concepts that relate to knowledge, Knowledge Management, Economic Intelligence and Temporal Reasoning.