Ontology Semantic Approach to Extraction of knowledge from Holy Quran Aliyu Rufai Yauri,Rabiah Abdul Kadir,Azreen Azman, Masrah Azrifah Azmi Murad Faculty of ComputerScience and Information Technology Universiti Putra Malaysia 43400 UPM Serdang, Selangor, Malaysia rufaialeey@yahoo.com, {rabiah, azreen, masrah}@fsktm.upm.edu.my Abstracts—with the continued demand for Islamic knowledge, which is mainly based on the Quran as a source of knowledge and wisdom, systems that facilitate an easy search of the content of the Quran remain a considerable challenge. Although in recent years there have been tools for Quran search, most of these tools are based on keyword search, meaning that the user needs to know the correct keywords before being able to retrieve the content of Quran. In this paper, we propose a system that supports the end user in querying and exploring the Quran ontology. The system comprises user query reformulation against the Quran ontology stored and annotated in the knowledge base. The Quran ontology consists of noun concepts identified in al- Quran, and the relationship that exists between these concepts. The user writes a query in the natural language and the proposed system reformulates the query to match the content found in the knowledge base in order to retrieve the relevant answer. The answer is represented by the Quranic verse related to the user query. Keywords: Islamic Knowledge; ontology; semantic technology; keyword matching I. INTRODUCTION The Holy Quran is a great book of knowledge and wisdom that constitutes the main source of guidance for Muslims. Since the first revelation, the Holy Quran remains among the most influential books that exist [1]. The first revelation was believed to be revealed to Prophet Muhammad (SAW) through Angel Gabriel directly from God. The Quran consists of 114 chapters with 6,236 verses covering many themes and concepts that make up the divine knowledge and law. It covers a wide range of issues pertaining to the world and the Day of Judgment. Since its revelation, the Holy Quran has brought convincing knowledge beyond imagination covering different concepts including natural science. Over the 1,400 years of its existence, the Holy Quran has brought great knowledge to mankind concerning natural sciences, which, until recently, have continued to be discovered by scientists. The Holy Quran, through its verses, has categorically revealed and described various natural science concepts. Various science concepts, such as biological organisms, disease, astronomical bodies, and body parts, among others, have been clearly described in Al-Quran. Although religious scholars, teachers and students have worked hard in identifying different important topics and verses relating to these topics [1], due to the lack of enough computational tools to search the content of the Holy Quran and the nature in which the Quran is presented, the extensive natural scientific knowledge from Quran has been left underutilized. In addition, researchers, including interpreters, jurisprudents, theologians, and Hadith experts have all invested a lifetime efforts of scientific and technical views in contemplating this divine miracle [2]. However, there has been no significant effort to facilitate semantic searching and linking of the verses of the Holy Qur‘an with the relevant scholarly and authentic literature to produce a careful, well-informed interpretation [3]. Most of the current search systems are based on keyword matching, which lack semantic search capabilities to semantically search for the important knowledge from the Holy Quran. In this work, we propose the use of the ontology semantic search approach to represent the Quran domain to answer user queries. We used Quran ontology from Leeds University for the evaluation. The ontology is made up of important noun concepts found in the Quran and the relationship that exists between these concepts. In this approach, the system accepts user queries made up of complete expressions in statements or paragraphs asked by the user. The system makes use of Quran ontology that identifies the important concepts from the Holy Quran and verses related to these concepts. 2013 5th International Conference on CSIT ISBN: 978-1-4673-5824-8 978-1-4673-5825-5/13/$31.00 ©2013 IEEE Published by the IEEE Computer Society 19