umma - Cyber solace in the digital age: Faith-based top level domain extension for a global muslim union

With the increasing pervasiveness and proliferation of the Internet, we notice an immediate global impact within the Muslim world. A growing academic interest also has acknowledged and highlighted this cyber trend. Researchers highly welcome and encourage lay Muslims to express their opinions, and so knot them together within the bond of a global family. This world-wide community is often known as “imagine community,” “digital umma” or “virtual umma”. Perceiving this new community is fascinating, but fraught with the challenges to define the “virtual umma” because the Internet is too huge and too disorganized. To provide substance to the abstract concept of virtual umma, and to make the opaque movement less diffuse, this paper proposes a faith based Top Level Domain (TLD) extension to set a boundary to the idea. Still, the new community on the cyber space will continue to benefit from being “deterritorialized,”1 and will allow the expansion of umma on a global scale. A faith-based TLD will introduce and ensure an inherent growth of an ontology for any specific domain (problem space) i.e. `Islam´ or `Muslim.´ These domain ontologies contain a conceptual schema which ensures the domain-specific quality of the schemas to develop a robust collective knowledge system [9].