Distributed knowledge management is an emerging discipline that enables utilization of knowledge assets from different domains. Identification and management of knowledge assets within a distributed environment is by no means a trivial task; several obstacles, such as heterogeneity management, effective query processing and retrieval, security are all tasks that demand intelligent solutions. In this paper we present an agent based architecture that implements the concept of distributed knowledge management. Ontologies have been used to facilitate semantically enhanced querying and for standardization of agent messages. Software agents in our approach also enable automated security management using a policy management approach.