Semantic web services for Nubian language

A pilot study was conducted to test the ability of semantic web tools to design the Nubian Ontology for Nubba civilization. An important objective of the pilot study was to investigate the capability of the tools which help in developing semantic web services such as multilingual Dictionary and information retrieval (IR) services to design Nubian Ontology. TobBraid Composer was used as a tool in this study to test if it supported Nubian letters. Also the pilot Ontology which had been designed consisted of 18 classes and 4 properties representing the translation and pronunciation form/to Nubian, Arabic and English languages. Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS) was used for first the time in semantic research to represent Arabic and Nubian letters. The results indicated TobBraid composer displayed Nubian letters correctly and the inference engine answered the simple and complex queries. Multilingual dictionary designed and tested with simple query and complex query and the result was displayed correctly as plain text and as visual map.