Using Knowledge Management Technologies in Searching Medicinal Learning Objects

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.