The existed methods of association rules retrieval have not given enough high-level semantic information retrieval support. In order to resolve this problem, we propose a new method of association rules retrieval that is based on ontology and semantic web. Ontologybased association rules retrieval method can well deal with the problems of rule semantics sharing, rule semantics consistency and intelligibility. We discuss our ontology-based association rules retrieval method in detail and implement a prototype system called OARR using Prot?g? tools. In this paper, the system architecture of O-ARR is firstly brought forward, and then the retrieval methods of O-ARR are listed and discussed. Several key issues of O-ARR, which include establishment of rule retrieval ontology, annotation of ontology instance, query parse and user interface, are analyzed. Our method also gives a technique support for further rule information utilization, such as rule information automatic analysis and intelligent reasoning.