Building a Model for Holy Quran Tajweed Knowledge using Ontology

Abstract

The Holy Quran is the word of Allah Almighty revealed by His Messenger Muhammad (peace be upon him). It has a set of rules governing the way in which the words of the Quran should be pronounced during its recitation (Tajweed). The objective of this research is to design an ontology for Holy Quran Tajweed (Articulations Points of the Letters, Un Vowel Noon and Tanween) to support the learning of this part of Tajweed and to facilitate the sharing of knowledge with the other Holy Quran applications. In order to achieve this goal, the researcher adopted the applied approach using protégé framework with OWL to build the Ontology. This research listed the steps of ontology development process. Enumerated the terms that can possibly found in the domain, and then addressed the complex issues of defining class hierarchies, organized them in a hierarchy depending on which class subsumes another. And then defined properties for each class and the relationships linked these classes. Also restrictions were put on some properties according to what the rules of Tajweed stipulate. Last step in designing the ontology was added instances to each class to be able to make queries, and ensure that all the classes are consistent with each other by using the Reasoner. Finally, some Queries were applied to the ontology using both DL Query and SPARQL Query. The designed ontology can retrieves information about Articulation Points of the Letters, Un Vowel Noon and Tanween. Furthermore, it can be shared and reused in applications related to the Holy Quran. Key words: Quran, Tajweed, Articulations Points of the Letters, Ontology, Un Vowel Noon, Tanween