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Abstract:In the past years, great advances have been made in the development of ontologies applied to the field of engineering design, essentially in functional and structural models. OntoFaBeS is an ontology whose objective is to formalize the knowledge about a product in order to infer different structures of that product from functional requirements set by the user. Hence, an effective tool capable of assisting the designer in the rational design phase is created. OntoFaBeS does not only provide the product redesign, but also allows for the evaluation of the different design alternatives created. OntoFaBeS can also capture the knowledge obtained from queries. This knowledge may be represented later in a CAE system. In order to illustrate the operation of OntoFaBeS, a mechanical pencil is used as an application example. This allows for a thorough assessment of the ontology design, wherein a query proves the ontology's ability to infer knowledge.