Configuration design lies in the later stage of the conceptual design. It affects the
downstream of design process and decides product structure. Therefore, it is necessary to pursue an
approach to support such design stage activities. Port, as the location of intended interaction, plays an
important role in the configuration design, which abstractly represents the intended exchange of
signals, energy or material in a convenient way. Ontology is an unambiguous and flexible semantic
specification corresponding entities, and it can effectively describe the function of port. In this paper,
we firstly give port concept and port functional description, and their semantic synthesis is used to
describe port ontology. Second, we build an ontology repository which contains the assorted primitive
concepts and primitive knowledge to map the component connections and interactions. Meanwhile
we provide a model of port-based multi-views which contains functional view, behavior view and
configuration view, and gives the attributes and taxonomy of ports. Next, a port-based ontology
language (PBOL) is described to represent the process of port ontology refinement, and a port-based
FBS modeling framework is presented to describe system configuration. Finally, a revised tape case is
given to show the application of the port-based ontology.