In order to meet the ever-changing customer demands, smart manufacturing needs to intelligently integrate and coordinate the entire manufacturing supply chain. Event-driven architecture has been considered as a promising enabler for smart manufacturing. However, in the primitive event-driven architecture all components work in parallel, and there are few frameworks or standards that deal with organizing and managing the components. This paper proposes an ontology based holonic event-driven architecture for smart manufacturing systems. Powered by the developed ontology model and Semantic Web technology, the ontology based architecture enables the distributed components in a smart manufacturing system to be configured autonomously and collaborate with each other even when they don’t know much about their counterpart.