Forging die design is heavily dependent on engineers experiences. But traditional AI technologies can barely provide a standard knowledge representation style for knowledge transferring. This paper introduces ontology into forging die design. 3-layer forging die design ontology is built, which includes Meta-ontology, Domain-ontology and Bottom ontology. Further, by conceptualization, the concepts and their relations are formally addressed by primitives such as Term, Relation and Function etc, which are explicitly expressed by concept tree. Bottom ontology uses Knowledge Item and Prototype to represent and capture general knowledge for knowledge reuse and share. Forging die design ontology building approach is discussed for standard knowledge representation, knowledge mine and knowledge driven CAD design etc. And OWL language is employed for integration among different domain ontologies integration. Finally a locomotive forging die KBE system is presented to demonstrate this approach.