ABSTRACT
Ontologies improve IR systems regarding its retrieval and presentation of information, which make the task of finding information more effective, efficient, and interactive. In this paper we argue that ontologies also greatly improve the engineering of such systems. We created a framework that uses ontology to drive the process of engineering an IR system. We developed a prototype that shows how a domain specialist without knowledge in the IR field can build an IR system with interactive components. The resulting system provides support for users not only to find their information needs but also to extend their state of knowledge. This way, our approach to ontology-enabled information retrieval addresses both the engineering aspect described here and also the usability aspect described elsewhere