Arabic Semantic Web Applications – A Survey

Abstract

Arabic Language is the mother tongue for 23 countries and more than 350 million persons. It is the language of the Holy Quran; therefore, many non-Arabic Islamic countries, like Pakistan, teach Arabic as a second language. Nevertheless, it is observable that the Arabic content on the Web is less than what should be. The evolution of the Semantic Web (SW) added a new dimension to this problem. This paper is an attempt to figure out the problem, its causes, and to open avenues to think about the solutions. The survey presented in this paper concerned with the SW applications regarding the Arabic Language in the domains of Ontology construction and utilization, Arabic WordNet (AWN) exploiting and enrichment, Arabic Named Entities Extraction, Holy Quran and Islamic Knowledge semantic representation, and Arabic Semantic Search Engines. In fact, the study revealed serious deficiencies in dealing semantically with the Arabic Language. That is mainly owing to the rarity of tools that can support the Arabic script. Furthermore, the Arabic resources, if available, are not free. Moreover, there are many technical problems in the semantic dealing with the Arabic context. Therefore, most of the developed applications are not sufficiently proficient. However, due to the significance of the Arabic Language, it is inevitable to overcome these deficiencies in order to put the Arabic Language in the category of the machine-semantically- interpretable languages, rather than just the textually processable ones. This way, we can exploit the power of the Semantic Web features in extracting the essence of the knowledge residing in the Arabic web documents and going beyond dealing with its rigid texts.