The wide application of FMEA in reliability engineering is generally appreciated, and how to identify the failure modes is the key to it. Failure modes, however, rely only on specific components rather than the system architecture, and therefore could be reused in different FMEAs. A novel ontology-based method, to recognize and reuse specific failure modes in existing databases, is provided here, and a light weight tool is developed for this method. The method and the tool can also be used in other fields with similar scenarios.