In this paper we present a case study of applying a knowledge management toolset during the lifetime of an EU funded research and development project. The name of this project is BREIN, and its participants are from 17 organizations of 6 countries, including MTA SZTAKI. The BREIN project takes the e-business concept developed in recent Grid research projects, namely the concept of so-called "dynamic virtual organizations" towards a more business-centric model, by enhancing the system with methods from artificial intelligence, intelligent systems, semantic web etc. During this work, software architecture issues are discussed and evaluated, software components are implemented and tested, use-case environments are planned and integrated. These activities require and produce knowledge very extensively. Usually all the knowledge needed to perform these activities exist at some project partners, but it is often implicit and distributed over different sources. The knowledge is not easily accessible, so our goal is to organize it and facilitate the usage of the BREIN knowledge space for the project consortium and in the end also for externals who want to make use of the BREIN platform.

The BREIN knowledge space:

• Provides a graphic representation of key knowledge elements in order to simplify the content,
• Provides a stepwise guideline for development and deployment processes by pointing out key activities,
• Enables guided navigation through the knowledge content,
• Integrates different knowledge resources like documents, hyperlinks, code samples or videos.

The method followed to implement the BREIN knowledge has been developed and improved in several past EU projects. This methodology guides organisations from the development of the knowledge management strategy to the design and implementation of a process based knowledge management system (KMS). The paper presents the steps to create the knowledge space and the ways collected knowledge can be accessed. The knowledge space provides a set of Web-based tools for the various roles and activities during access and maintenance of the knowledge in 3 larger groups covering knowledge authoring, knowledge usage and knowledge evaluation. These are dynamic, collaborative tools not only for the authors, but also for the users who can rate and comment knowledge items as well as providing new knowledge items, thus making it a live representation of know-how.