The Hadith being the second source of legislation after the Holy Qur'an in the religion of Islam, it represents a large body of knowledge in unstructured textual form. The specification of Hadiths makes its automatic exploitation a rather robust and an almost impossible task. To enable different types of computer systems to exploit this knowledge, various researchers used a formal representation of the semantics of Hadith. The widely used semantic representation is ontology defined as concepts and relations extracted from the Hadith in the form of a structure interpretable both by the machine and the human. In this article, we propose an ontology of the Hadith using an approach inspired by the "METHONTOLOGY" methodology. In this project, we are dealing with religious texts in traditional Arabic, and we face many difficulties in achieving complete precision and correctness. Hence, we decided to follow an entirely manual process to ensure the correctness of the results. Since manual ontology development is both time and effort consuming, we decided to focus only on "Wudhu2" related Hadiths.
In spite of the efforts made in the Arabic language on the syntactic and semantic level, it remains very restricted, even those on the Arabic Sacred Book are few and very limited, due to its difficulties and peculiarities. In this paper we tried to shed the light on some of the recent works that have been conducted to present a semantic representation and manipulation of the Islamic texts to define the problems, limitations and the possible future works that need our intention to improve the semantic support in the Arabic religious texts. Furthermore, we intent to briefly present our project that aims to help us reading, understanding, and interpreting the Islamic legislative sources. The goal of this project is divided into two main tasks which are the creation of an ontology representing the Islamic knowledge and the development of a system which can analyze this knowledge. The ultimate goal is to assist the muftis and facilitate their job.
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