Semantic Search Engine in Institutional Repository: An Ontological Approach Maizatul Akmar Ismailauthor Mashkuri Yaacobauthor Sameem Abdul Kareemauthor Ahmad Haris Abdul HalimauthorIn Malaysia, the majority of electronically enabled academic related literature have increased in number. As the concept of Institutional Repository (IR) is relatively new, these collections of literature would definitely be a contributor to the IR contents. A recent study shows positive feedback from students towards establishing an IR in local universities. This paper explores the problems in searching text-based content in the context of IR. The problem with generic search engine is that it will retrieve irrelevant results and users need to spend more time filtering the information that will suit them most. The absence of semantic relations in the collections of academic related publication would result in a penalty as the process of exploring the contents will expand to all occurrences of a given word(s) and may retrieve irrelevant information as term(s) can have different meanings. Clearly, a specialize search engine which can elaborate search queries semantically to find conceptual relations between documents (i.e. the ontology) and retrieve related articles in a more efficient way is highly in need. This paper discusses related researches on providing semantic search in text corpus. Next, a proposal in refining an ontology construction process is discussed. Finally, the paper concludes with future directions of research in this areaT Technology, Engineering2007-06-26Library & Information Science Unit, Faculty of Computer Science & Information Technology, University of Malaya Kuala LumpurConference or Workshop Item