Journal of Digital Information Management Hajer Baazaoui, Marie-Aude Aufaure, Rania Soussi 6 5 2008 http://www.dirf.org/jdim/v6n5a3.asp The huge number of available documents on the Web makes finding relevant ones a challenge. Thus, searching for information becomes more and more complex because of the growing volume of data and of its lack of structure. The quality of results that traditional full-text search engines provide is still not optimal for many types of user queries. Especially, the ambiguities of natural languages and abstract concepts are handled inadequately by full-text search engines. Ontologies provide a solution to these problems. They can help a user to find documents related to a specific domain. This paper proposes a new retrieval system based on ontologies. This system integrates results from traditional full-text engines, and thus supports a gradual transition from classical full-text search engines to ontology-based ones.