The stand-alone knowledge model for typical model based configuration system does not meet the new requirements imposed by online configuration in the distributed and dynamic computing environments for cooperating product and service providers. A multi-layered ontology is proposed to model the knowledge base of local configuration system. Different from existed configuration models, the proposed ontology takes the process knowledge of distributed systems into considered which support integration among distributed configuration systems. Furthermore the process model also provides possibility to optimize algorithm of configuration question resolving. The semantic Web services as a platform is utilized to obtain the reuse of available configuration problem solving systems.
