In todays web search technologies, the link structure of the web plays a critical role. In this work, the goal is to use semantic relationships for ranking documents without relying on the existence of any specific structure in a document or links between documents. Instead, named/real-world entities are identified and the relevance of documents is determined using relationships that are known to exist between the entities in a populated ontology, that is, by connecting-the-dots. We introduce a measure of relevance that is based on traversal and the semantics of relationships that link entities in an ontology. The implementation of the methods described here builds upon an existing architecture for processing unstructured information that solves some of the scalability aspects for text processing, indexing and basic keyword/entity document retrieval. The contributions of this thesis are in demonstrating the role and benefits of using relationships for ranking documents when a user types a traditional keyword query. The research components that make this possible are as follows. First, a flexible semantic discovery and ranking component takes user-defined criteria for identification of the most interesting semantic associations between entities in an ontology. Second, semantic analytics techniques substantiate feasibility of the discovery of relevant associations between entities in an ontology of large scale such as that resulting from integrating a collaboration network with a social network (i.e., for a total of over 3 million entities). In particular, one technique is introduced to measure relevance of the nearest or neighboring entities to a particular entity from a populated ontology. Last, the relevance of documents is determined based on the underlying concept of exploiting semantic relationships among entities in the context of a populated ontology. Our research involves new capabilities in combining the relevance measure techniques along with using or adapting earlier capabilities of semantic metadata extraction, semantic annotation, practical domain-specific ontology creation, fast main-memory query processing of semantic associations, and document-indexing capabilities that include keyword and annotation-based document retrieval. We expect that the semantic relationship-based ranking approach will be either an alternative or a complement to widely deployed document search for finding highly relevant documents that traditional syntactic and statistical techniques cannot find.