The IEC 61499 standard is targeting the enhancement of the IEC 61131-3 PLC standard in distributed automation systems improving the reconfigurability, portability and reusability of automation software. This paper proposes a foundation to a novel approach for design the system based on IEC 61499 function blocks. This design process is including design recovery, configuration, semantic analysis and code generation using ontology models as the knowledge base. The IEC 61499 ontology model is provided as well as the semantic enrichment and corrections are described. The semantic analysis for IEC 61499 and the entire framework for code generation will be completed in the future.