Semantic Web Application for Historical Concepts Search in Al-Quran

Abstract

With the growth of Islamic related documents on the web, several search engines exist today to pull out these documents such as data about Islamic history. However, most of the information retrieval on the web is based on keyword search and it is struggled with the ambiguity of natural language. To overcome this problem, a concept of semantic web is introduced by W3C consortium. The aim of this paper is to apply semantic web technology to retrieved historical concepts from the Holy Quran. The semantic web technology will improve the precision of knowledge retrieval from Quran. We used ontology and Jena inference engine to answer queries in natural language, which is related to the historical concepts in Quran. For the experiment, we used queries that were asked by the visitor of Islamic Research foundation website.  The result shows that the precision is improved from traditional keywords search. This paper highlights the potential of semantic web technology in retrieving the related Islamic documents.