Symbiosis of thesaurus, domain expert and reference sources in designing a framework for the construction of a multilingual ontology for Islamic Portal

Abstract

This paper discusses the conceptual and vocabulary problems users faced when searching the web and subsequently shows how a well structured thesaurus can be used as knowledge base for an interface that can assist user with search topic clarification. Recent research justified that thesaurus is useful in building ontology to help standardize terminologies and more importantly help to save time in building ontology that fully depend on domain expert. Several initiatives has been undertaken in web'ifying thesaurus with the idea of converting thesaurus or controlled vocabularies to web standards such as Web Ontology (OWL). The aim of this research is to explore how thesaurus can be integrated into ontology development. Our research method emphasizes on web technologies and the development of ontology using thesaurus, domain expert and reference sources such as Index Islamicus, encyclopedia, biographies etc. as the basis for implementing novel mechanism for retrieving Islamic web in 3 different languages simultaneously. As a result, we developed a framework for the development of Islamic ontology that advocates the symbiosis of thesaurus, domain expert and several reference sources in Islam as the basis for the construction of a multilingual ontology for our Islamic portal. In recent years, there were a variety of difficulties that users have to face in searching for information through Internet. Past research had shown that in performing searches, users use query terms that consist of everyday language, technical terms (with or without knowledge of underlying concepts) and various explanatory model, all influenced by psychosocial and cultural variations. (1).Very often users failed to retrieve relevant information that meet their needs and this could be due to the conceptual and vocabulary problems that users faced when searching the web. The first part of this paper elucidates queries illustrating these problems and how a well structured thesaurus can be used as knowledge base for an interface that can assist user with search topic clarification. We then explain how thesaurus helps users to identify the right appropriate concepts to use when searching for information through Internet. However, if we want to create a knowledge-rich description of, for example an (image of an) art object, medical, business, crime etc. such as required by the semantic web, thesauri turn out to provide only part of the knowledge needed. The second part of this paper discussed various controlled vocabularies, classification schemes and thesauri that can serve as some building blocks of the web. These vocabularies have been developed over decades and can be used in the development of robust web services and Semantic Web technologies. Thus the third part of this paper, addresses initiatives undertaken to 'web'ifying' thesaurus with the idea of converting thesaurus/controlled vocabularies to web standards. Since the aim of this research is to develop ontology using symbiotic approach involving thesaurus, then fourth and fifth part of this paper discuss the concept of ontology and thesaurus. Part six analysed the