Ontological approach for semantic modeling and querying the Qur’an

Abstract

The Qur’an is considered as the first source of knowledge and guidance for Muslims throughout the world. It’s a difficult book to understand and to interpret without consulting domain experts and Qur’anic commentaries (Tafsir books). Therefore it’s very sensitive to analyze and to model his content for fear to make bad assumptions and axioms. In recent years a number of researches has been done to facilitate the retrieval of knowledge from the Qur’an, but most of the available researches are using human readable data resources and therefore cannot be reused and linked using semantic web technologies. This is why in this project we will adopt an approach that enables humans and computers to understand the Qur’an knowledge throughout the creation of a Qur’anic ontology. The goal of the ontology is to build a computational model capable of representing as much as possible of the concepts mentioned on the Qur’an and the relationships between them using Protégé-OWL. The ontology can be queried using SPARQL queries. For non-technical users we will build a tool that enables them to browse the content of the ontology.