The fast development of technologies and vocational demands require specialised and complex skills that need to be renewed frequently. Therefore, the role of continuing education and lifelong learning is becoming still more important. The goal of the CUBER project was to develop a system that supports learners in searching higher education courses that match their specialised needs. A corner stone of such a system is the metadata attached to courses and other relevant elements. However, the mere metadata itself is not very useful without the ontology that gives the semantics for the metadata. Basically, the ontology used in the system is the framework where we can match learners? profiles (queries) against courses? metadata (course profiles), thus providing a mechanism for ensuring that the learner finds relevant and interesting courses. In this paper, we present the CUBER system and the ontology developed for the CUBER metadata that is based on the Learning Object Metadata standard.