Build a search engine in 20 minutes or less by Ben Ogorek.
I was suspicious but pleasantly surprised by the demonstration of the vector space model you will find here.
True, it doesn’t offer all the features of the latest Lucene/Solr releases but it will give you a firm grounding on vector space models.
Enjoy!
PS: One thing to keep in mind, semantics do not map to vector space. We can model word occurrences in vector space but occurrences are not semantics.