Handling Words Duplication and Memory Management for Digital Quran Based on Hexadecimal Representation and Sparse Matrix

Abstract

Al-Quran is the holy book of the Muslims and the most important scripture containing knowledge on many domains. The recent advent of smart technologies like smart phones, digital devices and tablets has connected the daily life routines under a single touch adopted by many, these new tools with an exponential growth. This paper presented a Digital Quran Model (DQM) using hexadecimal representation using Unicode Hexadecimal and UTF-8 for character encoding, which is backward compatible with ASCII code. DQM target to handle all duplicated words or verses in Al-Quran using sparse matrix with double offset indexing to handle memory optimization. Three approaches were discussed: indexing and representation of the digital Quran to optimize storage, organize verses structure using sparse matrix to handle repetition with double offset indexing to efficiently use the space. The algorithms were implemented using Visual studio and Java server and the solution quality was measured by the size of a file before and after applying DQM model. For surah Al-Baqarah, the longest chapter in the Al-Quran, the reduction of the storage size was 25.00% whereas surah Al-Fatihah was 47.89%. The proposed DQM model is able to optimize the memory space and can be extended to other non-Roman characters used for information retrieval such as Hindi, Chinese and Japanese that are categorized in unicode standards.