Knowledge management systems described in research papers are rarely seen implemented in business realities, at least on a large scale. Companies are often tied to existing systems and cannot or would not revolutionize the situation to accommodate completely new solutions. Given this assumption, this work investigates several small-scale modifications that could be applied to in-place Information Systems so as to improve them with new technologies without major transformations and service discontinuities. The focus is interoperability, with a particular stress on the promotion of the ebXML registry standard. A universal interface for document management was defined, and the conforming “interoperable” DMSs were arranged within an architecture explicitly designed for ebXML-compliant access. This allowed standards-based manipulation of legacy DM systems. The closely related topic of Semantic knowledge management was also tackled. We developed Semantic tools integration for traditional repositories with low architectural impact. Finally, we discussed a novel issue in document categorization, and a new kind of ontology that could be used in that context