Knowledge organisation is an important topic for knowledge management and application. However, in the current knowledge-intensive manufacturing environment, documents are heterogeneous and come from multi-disciplinary domains and product process phases, which make the knowledge behind documents difficult to represent and manage. This hinders knowledge sharing and reuse in manufacturing activities. In order to solve the problem, this paper presents a novel multi-perspective modelling approach for manufacturing knowledge representation and organisation. It combines the ideas of ontologies and topic maps together to give a unified representation of knowledge association semantically. This new modelling method takes advantage of both ontologies and topic maps: general knowledge in domains is described with ontology-based descriptions, and specific knowledge, such as extended or new knowledge entities and relations, is described with topic map-based descriptions. It supports various relation types in manufacturing knowledge and organises association in different facets at several levels. In addition, it can be used in association management, information retrieval, semantic inference and expansion, recommendation and navigation for knowledge sharing and reuse. A case study for representing electronic manufacturing knowledge is introduced to demonstrate the implementation of the proposed method, which shows that it is valid and practical.