In the process of production design, engineers usually find it is difficult to seek and reuse others' empirical knowledge which is in the forms of lesson-learned documents. This study proposed a novel approach, which uses a semantic-based topic knowledge map system (STKMS) to support timely and precisely lesson-learned documents finding and reusing. The architecture of STKMS is designed, which has five major functional modules: lesson-learned documents pre-processing, topic extraction, topic relation computation, topic weights computation, and topic knowledge map generation modules. Then STKMS implementation is briefly introduced. We have conducted two sets of experiments to evaluate quality of knowledge map and the performance of utilizing STKMS in outfitting design of a ship-building company. The first experiment shows that knowledge maps generated by STKMS are accepted by domain experts from the evaluation since precision and recall are high. The second experiment shows that STKMS-based group outperforms browse-based group in both learning score and satisfaction level, which are two measurements of performance of utilizing STKMS. The promising results confirm the feasibility of STKMS in helping engineers to find needed lesson-learned documents and reuse related knowledge easily and precisely.