An ontological model of hadith texts: Semantic representation of hadith

Abstract

The Hadith being the second source of legislation after the Holy Qur'an in the religion of Islam, it represents a large body of knowledge in unstructured textual form. The specification of Hadiths makes its automatic exploitation a rather robust and an almost impossible task. To enable different types of computer systems to exploit this knowledge, various researchers used a formal representation of the semantics of Hadith. The widely used semantic representation is ontology defined as concepts and relations extracted from the Hadith in the form of a structure interpretable both by the machine and the human. In this article, we propose an ontology of the Hadith using an approach inspired by the "METHONTOLOGY" methodology. In this project, we are dealing with religious texts in traditional Arabic, and we face many difficulties in achieving complete precision and correctness. Hence, we decided to follow an entirely manual process to ensure the correctness of the results. Since manual ontology development is both time and effort consuming, we decided to focus only on "Wudhu2" related Hadiths.