a b s t r a c tTraditional case-based reasoning uses a table/frame or scenario to represent a case. It assumed that similar input/event results in similar output/event state. However, similar cases may not have similar output/event states since problem solver may have different way to break down the problem. Thus, authors previously proposed problem-based case reasoning to overcome the limitation of the traditional approaches and used clustered ontology to represent the problem spaces of a case. However, synonym problem causes the mismatch of similar sub-problems of historical cases for new case. Thus, this paper proposed ontology-based similarity measurement to retrieve the similar sub-problems that overcomes the synonym problems on case retrieval. The recall and precise of ontology-based similarity measurement were higher than that of the traditional similarity measurement.