This summary reports on a pilot of a novel, ontology-based e-assessment system in accounting. The system, OeLe, uses emerging semantic technologies to offer an online assessment environment capable of marking students' free text answers to questions of a conceptual nature. It does this by matching their response with a "concept map" or "ontology" of domain knowledge expressed by subject specialists. This article describes the potential affordances and demands of ontology-based assessment and offers suggestions for future development of such an approach.