The representation and organization of learning
objects should provide the user with easy access to the
information in which he or she is interested.
Traditionally information retrieval systems support
keyword-based searching where the search engine
returns a set of documents (or links to the documents).
In the context of medicinal information systems it is
turned out that in many cases the returned documents
do not satisfy user’s information need. To alleviate
this problem we are developing a retrieval system,
which extends the functionality of keyword-based
searching by browsing functionalities. The browsing,
however, is not based on hyperlinks but rather on the
relationships that occur in medicinal ontologies,
which model medicinal learning objects as well as
their relationships to other medicinal concepts. In this
paper we motivate the need of such information
retrieval systems, and illustrate the use of Semantic
Web-technologies in developing the medicinal
ontologies on which the browsing is based on.