An increasing number of recent information retrieval systems make use of ontologies to help the users clarify their information needs and come up with semantic representations of documents. A particular concern here is the integration of these semantic approaches with traditional search technology. The research presented in this paper examines how ontologies can be efficiently applied to large-scale search systems for the web. We describe how these systems can be enriched with adapted

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... to provide both an in-depth understanding of the user's needs as well as an easy integration with standard vector-space retrieval systems. The ontology concepts are adapted to the domain terminology by computing a feature vector for each concept. Later, the feature vectors are used to enrich a provided query. The whole retrieval system is under development as part of a larger Semantic Web standardization project for the Norwegian oil & gas sector. 1 NFR project number 163457/S30 2 http://www.iso.org/