The participants in collaborative environment want to get the right information or documents which are intended to find. In general search systems, documents which contain only the key words are retrieved. For searching different word-expressions for the same meaning, we perform mapping before searching. Our mapping-based search approach has two parts, ontology-based mapping logic and ontology libraries. The ontology-based mapping consists of three steps such as character matching (CM), definition comparing (DC) and similarity checking (SC). First, the character matching is the mapping of two terminologies that have identical character strings. Second, the definition comparing is the method that compares two terminologies' ontological definitions. Third, the similarity checking pairs two terminologies which were not mapped by two prior steps through evaluating the similarity of the ontological definitions. For the ontology libraries, document ontology library (DOL), keyword ontology library (KOL), and mapping result library (MRL) are defined. With these three libraries and three mapping steps, an ontology-based search engine (OntSE) is built, and a use case scenario is discussed to show the applicability.
