Semantic search attempts to go beyond the current state of the art in information access by addressing information needs on the semantic level, i.e. considering the meaning of users’ queries and the available resources. In recent years, there have been significant advances in developing and applying semantic technologies to the problem of semantic search. To collate these various approaches and to try to better understand what the concept of semantic search entails, we describe semantic search from a process perspective. We argue that semantics can be exploited in all steps of this process. We describe the elements involved in the process using graph-structured, semantic models and present our existing work on semantic search in terms of this process.