We have developed a generic ontology of objects, and a knowledge base of everyday physical objects. Objects are represented as assemblies of functional features and their spatial relations. Generic shape information of objects and features is stored using a partial boundary representation. Formfunction reasoning is applied to deduce geometric shape elements from a feature’s functions. We have also developed a generic geometric shape based object recognition method which uses many local features. The proposed recognition method considers the concept of ontology for representation of generic functions of objects. And the use of a general shape-function reasoning with context understanding enhances the performance of object recognition.