Most existing ontology search engines primarily base their search mechanisms solely on keyword matching. Users, therefore, are not well equipped with expressive means to structurally and semantically describe their ontology needs. We propose an ontology retrieval system based on SQORE, a novel framework that enables precise formulation of a semantic query in order to best capture a user’s ontology requirements and rank the resulting ontologies based on their conceptual closeness to the given query. This paper develops a prototype system, investigates the effectiveness of SQORE framework, and compares its experimental results with the ones obtained from well-known ontology search engines. This investigative analysis indicates that SQORE system yields better results and better rankings.