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International Journal of Engineering & Technology, 7 (4.15) (2018) 80-86
International Journal of Engineering & Technology
Website: www.sciencepubco.com/index.php/IJET
Research paper
A Systematic Review on Semantic-based Ontology for Quranic
Knowledge
Asma Salsabila Muhmad Rusli
1
, Farida Ridzuan
1
*, Zulkifly Mohd Zaki
1
*, M Norazizi Sham Mohd Sayuti
1
*,
Rosalina Abdul Salam
1
*
1
Faculty of Science and Technology, Universiti Sains Islam Malaysia (USIM), Bandar Baru Nilai, 71800 Nilai, Negeri Sembilan, Malay-
sia
2
Faculty of Engineering and Built Environment, Universiti Sains Islam Malaysia (USIM), Bandar Baru Nilai, 71800 Nilai, Negeri Sem-
bilan, Malaysia
*Corresponding author E-mail: farida@usim.edu.my; zulkifly@usim.edu.my; azizi@usim.edu.my; rosalina@usim.edu.my
Abstract
The Holy Quran ontology models are gaining popularit y among researchers due to people’s demands in understanding this divine book.
Due to this, there are many studies and research have been conducted in this area to facilitate people’s understanding of the Quran. The
Quran knowledge is represented conforming to an ontology within a system framework. This also includes various concepts that are
interrelated with the others. From the literature, however, the existing Quranic ontology models do not cover all concepts in the Quran,
which limit them to domains such as place nouns, themes, pronouns, antonyms and Islamic knowledge in the Quran. Thus, this research
aims to identify relevant research works from various electronic data sources using systematic literature review (SLR) method to provide
a comprehensive review of this area. This paper presents a systematic review of the literature related to the existing ontology models,
where it leads to disseminating the correct knowledge of the Quran using semantic technologies.
Keywords: Ontology; Quran; Semantic; Systematic Review.
1. Introduction
Ontology is a knowledge representation of a collection of facts
and concepts about certain domain and describes how those con-
cepts interrelated with each other. It plays an important role in
semantic web, information extraction, artificial intelligence, natu-
ral language processing, and knowledge management etc. [1]. It is
relevant for knowledge-based systems as it can capture the
knowledge, process and depict the interrelations of the domains
and concepts in a particular ontology model. Currently, there are
many artificial intelligence models of the Quran incorporating
ontology to explore its divine knowledge such as [2-5]. These
intelligent systems were developed to answer questions regarding
underlying knowledge in the Quran. Quran is comprised of Arabic
scripts, complex structure and lexicons that convey implicit mean-
ings using different contexts. Its verses and words have ambigu-
ous interpretations despite the same structure of the word because
Arabic words could have varied meanings only with slight chang-
es of diacritics. For example, ‘الجنة’represents two distinct words:
‘ةّ نَ الج’ means paradise, and ‘ ةّ ن
ِ
الج’ means ghosts [6]. Researchers
have proposed different types of approaches and parameters in
developing and evaluating the Quran ontology models in terms of
their performances and efficiency. Recently, studies such as [7-8]
have been broadened to other fields involving Arabic vocabulary.
The semantic-based approach has been applied in many ontology
implementations within Quranic domains. This method has been
proven as effective compared to keyword search. For example, in
[9-11] implemented semantic search techniques which is the re-
trieved results match with a user’s query that are related to certain
concepts and synonym-sets that return all synonym results that
match with the query words. However, current research is limited
to a particular concept and domains resulting in challenges in cap-
turing and representing the knowledge. This can limit the accuracy
of search results and in the case where the ontologies are not
aligned to each other, inaccurate and incomprehensible resources
for the ontologies may result [2, 12].
In this paper, the existing ontology models of Quran are studied
and presented using Systematic Literature Review (SLR) inspired
from [13]. This has been applied in various fields such as software
engineering [14], information system [15] and networking [16].
SLR is a protocol that identify, evaluate and interpret all available
research relevant to the research questions, or the topic of inter-
ests. SLR is undertaken to review and identify any gaps and limi-
tations in the current studies.
The objectives of this systematic review are; 1) to review the ex-
isting implementation of ontologies of the Quran knowledge, 2) to
examine the existing models used to develop the ontology and 3)
to underline any limitations for proposing future studies in Quran
ontology. The rest of this paper is organized as follows: the outline
and details of research method are presented in Section 2. Section
3 explains the results from this study followed by the limitation of
existing studies in Section 4. Finally, conclusion and future re-
search directions are discussed in Section 5.
2. Methodology
This systematic literature review (SLR) is presented using formal
systematic literature review process by [13]. This process de-
scribes a protocol on generalizing the vast number of articles by
answering the research questions. This unbiased search is one