Applying Ontological Modeling on Quranic Nature Domain

📝 Abstract

The holy Quran is the holy book of the Muslims. It contains information about many domains. Often people search for particular concepts of holy Quran based on the relations among concepts. An ontological modeling of holy Quran can be useful in such a scenario. In this paper, we have modeled nature related concepts of holy Quran using OWL (Web Ontology Language) / RDF (Resource Description Framework). Our methodology involves identifying nature related concepts mentioned in holy Quran and identifying relations among those concepts. These concepts and relations are represented as classes/instances and properties of an OWL ontology. Later, in the result section it is shown that, using the Ontological model, SPARQL queries can retrieve verses and concepts of interest. Thus, this modeling helps semantic search and query on the holy Quran. In this work, we have used English translation of the holy Quran by Sahih International, Protege OWL Editor and for querying we have used SPARQL.

💡 Analysis

The holy Quran is the holy book of the Muslims. It contains information about many domains. Often people search for particular concepts of holy Quran based on the relations among concepts. An ontological modeling of holy Quran can be useful in such a scenario. In this paper, we have modeled nature related concepts of holy Quran using OWL (Web Ontology Language) / RDF (Resource Description Framework). Our methodology involves identifying nature related concepts mentioned in holy Quran and identifying relations among those concepts. These concepts and relations are represented as classes/instances and properties of an OWL ontology. Later, in the result section it is shown that, using the Ontological model, SPARQL queries can retrieve verses and concepts of interest. Thus, this modeling helps semantic search and query on the holy Quran. In this work, we have used English translation of the holy Quran by Sahih International, Protege OWL Editor and for querying we have used SPARQL.

📄 Content

2016 7th International Conference on Information and Communication Systems (ICICS) Applying Ontological Modeling on Quranic “Nature” Domain
A.B.M. Shamsuzzaman Sadi1, Towfique Anam2, Mohamed Abdirazak3, Abdillahi Hasan Adnan4, Sazid Zaman Khan5, Mohamed Mahmudur Rahman6, Ghassan Samara7 1,2,3,4,5Department of Computer Science and Engineering , International Islamic University Chittagong, Bangladesh 6Department of Science and Technology, Universiti Sains Islam Malaysia, Nilai, Malaysia 7Department of Internet Technology, Zarqa University, Jordan Email: abmsadi06@gmail.com1, towfiqueanam@protonmail.com2, maxamed319@gmail.com3, abdilaahi01@gmail.com4, szkhanctg@gmail.com5, provaiiuc@raudah.usim.edu.my6, gsamara@zu.edu.jo7

Abstract— The holy Quran is the holy book of the Muslims. It contains information about many domains. Often people search for particular concepts of holy Quran based on the relations among concepts. An ontological modeling of holy Quran can be useful in such a scenario. In this paper, we have modeled nature related concepts of holy Quran using OWL (Web Ontology Language) / RDF (Resource Description Framework). Our methodology involves identifying nature related concepts mentioned in holy Quran and identifying relations among those concepts. These concepts and relations are represented as classes/instances and properties of an OWL ontology. Later, in the result section it is shown that, using the Ontological model, SPARQL queries can retrieve verses and concepts of interest. Thus, this modeling helps semantic search and query on the holy Quran. In this work, we have used English translation of the holy Quran by Sahih International, Protege OWL Editor and for querying we have used SPARQL.
Keywords— Quranic Ontology; Semantic Quran; Quranic Knowledge Representation. I. INTRODUCTION
Search Engines are gradually augmenting their search using semantic search technologies. For example, Google’s Hummingbird algorithm is a major step towards semantic search on search engines. While semantic search is applicable for many domains, our goal is to search concepts, relations among concepts and verses of holy Quran using a semantic perspective. That means if one wants to search the verse that has concepts ALLAH and Rain and the relation between them; he should be able to get the desired result. Our final goal is a search engine that will be able to search any verse from holy Quran based on semantic or conceptual queries. But currently we are trying to build an ontology based on Quranic concepts as a foundation for this type of search engine. Since this is a work in progress and implementation of the semantic search engine has not yet been completed, we keep our discussions limited to methodologies of analyzing and searching holy Quran from an ontological perspective. This means that, for now, the search performance is not compared with familiar search engines available online; however this paper demonstrates a preliminary proof-of-concept and the basic principle for a semantic Quranic search engine. As holy Quran is a domain full of various subject matters, we are currently focusing on concepts that are related to Nature domain. Nature domain is a concept in holy Quran which has not yet been investigated extensively. The vision of a semantic web is extremely ambitious and would require solving many long- standing research problems in knowledge representation and reasoning, databases, computational linguistics, computer vision and agent systems. Semantic [1] search technology not only uses the keyword-based search but also makes relationship between two key concepts and the knowledge Base (KB). So the machine can understand the sentence using its knowledge about relationship between concepts that are in its KB. RDF triples are used to represent knowledge. This can help our users to search more accurately and precisely. Although, it has not been shown in this particular work, we are working towards a semantic search engine for holy Quran which is able to deal with search queries in colloquial English. Search made by users contain more concepts than keywords. To make it understandable to the machine and to find what exactly the user wants, semantic search is the best way for now. The first step of doing that is building a KB that will contain all the RDF triples that are in holy Quran. Human curiosity of knowing more about the nature and linking between nature and holy Quran leads them to ask critical questions. Often people can’t put these queries in a simple keyword-based query format suitable for query-based search engines because of the lack of the knowledge of all keywords of the Quranic sentence. Actually semantic search mechanisms help in such situations. Rest of the paper is organized in the following way: Section II analyzes the literature, Section III discusses the methodology, Section IV shows the resu

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