While the evolving high bandwidth information highways provide the infrastructure for attaining "physical connectivity" across computing resources and information systems, the "on/off" ramps to such highways are still at a primitive stage. Huge manual effort is currently expended to develop knowledge-based paradigms that can effectively transcend national borders as well as other types of borders. This paper examines the prevailing situation from four perspectives: (i) knowledge acquisition, which deals with the issue of nationwide applications that are still paper-intensive; (ii) knowledge discovery, which deals with the issue of mining of huge amounts of historical and current information in numerical, textual, and other formats; (iii) knowledge management, which focuses on aspects for which dominant standards and procedures prevail at the national level, but not at the international level; and (iv) knowledge dissemination, which deals with extracting knowledge that is tailored to the needs to each user. Unlike current approaches that tend to focus on one aspect only, an integrated approach that attaches appropriate weightage to each of the four facets is emphasized in this paper. Keywords: Knowledge Management, Knowledge Discovery, Knowledge Acquisition, Knowledge Dissemination, Knowledge Based Framework, Trans-national Transformations.