Towards Ontology Construction from Arabic Texts-A Proposed Framework

Ontology is one of the most popular representation model used for knowledge representation, sharing and reusing. In light of the importance of ontology, different methodologies for building ontologies have been proposed. Ontology construction is a difficult and time-consuming process. Many efforts have been made to help ontology engineers to construct ontologies and to overcome the bottleneck of knowledge acquisition. But the majority of these methods have focused on the English language. There is a huge amount of information and knowledge in Arabic documents. So, there is a dispirit need for building Arabic ontology. In this paper, we propose a framework for ontology construction from Arabic texts based on The Holy Hadith (Sayings of the Prophet Mohammed). We also summarize the state of the art in Arabic ontology construction. The challenges facing ontology engineers in constructing ontology from Arabic texts and the way these challenges might be solved is discussed.