An Ontology of the Worldview of Islam to Annotate Islamic Texts Digital Archives

Magazines and newspapers written in Jawi, an Arabic script used to write Malay until the late 50´s, provided an active arena for discussions. In order to understand what happened in this era, we started to provide these in digital form. However, it is difficult to understand the documents contained in this digital archive without knowing their context. Particularly, as Jawi was used mainly by scholars of Islam, a lot of Islam key terms are left unexplained. In this paper, we created an ontology of the worldview of Islam and propose a semantic approach to let expert users annotate the archive so that the context becomes explicit. We present our architecture and illustrate it with the annotation of an article extracted from the Qalam digital archive.