A framework for building multilingual ontologies for 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. Semantically annotated documents provide several advantages. One advantage is document specific representations no longer affect the search. This is extremely important in the case of multilingual representations. Keywords of several languages are mapped to the same concept in an ontology and are therefore given the same meaning. Multilingual search portal can be established to produce the same results, no matter which language is used for retrieval. This research aim to identify and analyze ontology that relates to Islam to enhance the use of exact vocabularies and to develop an ontology based Islamic semantic retrieval that can retrieve Islamic web in 3 different languages simultaneously through a multilingual search portal. This research emphasizes on semantic web technologies and the development of ontology using thesaurus such as Library Congress Subject Heading and other reference sources such as Index Islamicus, thesaurus, encyclopaedia, biographies etc. as the basis for implementing novel mechanism for retrieving Islamic web in 3 different languages simultaneously. In this research, existing knowledge sources such as documents, reports, etc. are mapped into the domain ontology and semantically enriched. This semantically enriched information enables better knowledge indexing and searching process and implicitly a better management of knowledge.