Building Hadith Ontology to Support the Authenticity of Isnad

Abstract

The two fundamental sources of Islamic legislation are Qur’an and Hadith. Hadiths, or prophetic traditions, are narrations originating from the sayings and actions of Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him). Isnad or Sanad is the chain of narrators attesting to the historical authenticity of a particular Hadith. It helps differentiate between the accepted and rejected Hadiths. In this paper we build a domain specific ontology (Hadith Isnad Ontology) to support the process of authenticating/judging Isnad. We evaluate the ontology through Hadith example and DL-Queries. The developed ontology will be used (in a future work) to automatically generate a suggested judgment of Hadith Isnad.