Building Domain Ontology: Experiences in Developing the Prophetic Ontology Form Quran and Hadith

Ontologies have been designed for the purpose of representing a domain of knowledge in a way that makes it understandable by machines and humans. Ontologies have been used in many areas in computer sciences such as knowledge engineering, semantic web, and information retrieval. Religious studies is one of the areas were ontologies are in demand. In this paper, we present the design of domain ontology about prophets and messengers in Islam from trustworthy resources: the Quran and Hadith. The ontology can be used to better understanding all life aspects of prophets and messengers in Islam. The classes, relations and properties of this special domain ontology were gathered and integrated to help researchers to identify and explore knowledge about prophets in Islam such as their lives, books and teachings, the nature of the messages they brought to their nations and tribes and much more.