Towards a Joint Ontology of Quran and Hadith

Abstract

The Quran and the Hadith are two religious texts used by Muslims as reference to perform their daily religious obligations. Hence, developing a computational tool to better understand and link these different texts would be useful for Islamic scholars, learners, and laymen. We hypothesise that linking them using a knowledge-based approach by extending a Quran ontology to cover the Hadith is possible. However, there are several Quran ontologies and none of these were rigorously evaluated using a standard ontology evaluation method. For this reason, we started our experiment by enumerating and discussing the existing Quran ontologies. Then the best candidates of the enumerated ontologies are evaluated using a corpus-based approach to visualize the overlap between these ontologies and the Hadith. Our experiment shows that one Quran ontology could be used as a starting point for a larger scope of an Islamic ontology that covers both the Quran and Hadith.