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Currently, techniques for content description and query processing in Information Retrieval (IR) are based on keywords, and therefore provide limited capabilities to capture the conceptualizations associated with user needs and contents. Aiming to solve the limitations of keyword-based models, the idea of conceptual search, understood as searching by meanings rather than literal strings, has been the focus of a wide body of research in the IR field. More recently, it has been used as a prototypical scenario (or even envisioned as a potential “killer app”) in the Semantic Web (SW) vision, since its emergence in the late nineties. However, current approaches to semantic search developed in the SW area have not yet taken full advantage of the acquired knowledge, accumulated experience, and technological sophistication achieved through several decades of work in the IR field. Starting from this position, this work …