Retrieving and composing individuals' capabilities are the matter of several research fields, like competence-based management, human resources management, enterprise knowledge management systems, knowledge representation systems, etc. This talk focuses on capability representation, discovery and composition in heterogeneous, and possibly distributed, knowledge representation environments. A driving motivation of this work is to provide a contribution to the satisfaction of the need for retrieving individualswho may carry out actions, as well as the need for retrieving individuals who, when putting their competences together, may carry out actions. We outline some formal capability description languages , and we propose approaches and algorithms for capability management, discovery and composition. In addition, we outline how our proposals are implemented in a mediator-based prototype system under a service oriented architecture and a Peer-to-Peer architecture.