Current information retrieval (IR) approaches do not formally capture the explicit meaning of a keyword query but provide a comfortable way for the user to specify information needs on the basis of keywords. Ontology-based approaches allow for sophisticated semantic search but impose a query syntax more difficult to handle. In this paper, we present an approach for translating keyword queries to DL conjunctive queries using background knowledge available in ontologies. We present an implementation which shows that this interpretation of keywords can then be used for both exploration of asserted knowledge and for a semantics-based declarative query answering process.We also present an evaluation of our system and a discussion of the limitations of the approach with respect to our underlying assumptions which directly points to issues for future work.