This article is an account of the evolution of the French-speaking research community on knowledge acquisition and knowledge modelling echoing the complex and cross-disciplinary trajectory of the field. In particular, it reports the most significant steps in the parallel evolution of the web and the knowledge acquisition paradigm, which finally converged with the project of a semantic web. As a consequence of the huge amount of available data in the web, a paradigm shift occurred in the domain, from knowledge-intensive problem solving to large-scale data acquisition and management. We also pay a tribute to Rose Dieng, one of the pioneers of this research community.