Applying ontological engineering approach for Arabic Quran corpus: A comprehensive survey

Abstract

The Arabic language is the spoken language in the Semitic languages groups, which is spoken by more than 422 million people. It is the language of the Islamic Holy Quran, so all the Muslims should learn it. In general, there is a shortage in semantic resources for the Arabic language especially in Arabic ontologies. These semantic resources are important parts in both Information Retrieval (IR) like search engines and Question Answering (QA). Also, these semantic resources should be available, readable and understandable. Through the semantic web, ontologies play a central role to support the search engine process. In recent years, a lot of researchers are concerned in building Arabic ontologies, which can be exploited by others. This paper investigates the current studies on the ontological engineering approach and ontology techniques for the Holy Quran by comparing the general criteria such as ontology construction, the domain name in the Quran, and the availability in search index. Finally, this paper concludes that there are a lot of researchers presents the ontology in specific domain in the Quran and tried to develop an upper ontology, but it is not complete and did not use semantic technology.