Ontology Based Knowledge Retrieval and Semantic Modelling of Qur'an with Contextual Information

Abstract

Quran is the holy book of Muslims that was reviled on the last Prophet Muhammad (PBUH). It contains the complete code of life not only for Muslims but also for mankind. Quran is also a source of humongous information about science and technology as well. To gather the organized knowledge about Islam with all references and verses in one collective form, the basic understanding of Quran, its semantics and its lexicon is always the first step. For that purpose, ontology plays a pivotal role in gathering and presenting the Quran knowledge. Current ontology based semantic approaches show redundant and has numerous errors in delivering sincere concepts of Quran with multi-references and verses and not considering the contextual information. Furthermore, previous approaches only consider the Quranic information and its concept, without correlating the information about subject and its authenticity by giving the cross references of Quran with context. Learning about the Quranic information and its topics is extremely important and should deliver valid, sincere and authentic information. This paper is proposing a technique that helps in learning of Quran by utilizing the semantic based search approach with cross references about subject and context. For this purpose, an application is developed to form several datasets which link chapters, verses, words and concepts with their reference chapters, verses, words and concepts defined in Quran with the help of authentic books written by Islamic scholars and also by consulting different scholars. Then these datasets are transformed into ontology, which links up each subject with other related subjects and context so far, we had represented the following concepts: chapter, verse, word, pronoun reference, topic, location, living creation and event. Furthermore, an application is developed to run queries and perform different searches related to Quranic knowledge on this Ontology.