A Domain Ontology for Modeling the Book of Purification in Islam
This work addresses a gap in Islamic studies by providing a foundational ontology for purification practices, which is incremental as it applies standard ontology development methods to a specific religious domain.
The paper tackled the lack of structured knowledge representation for the Book of Purification in Islam by developing a domain ontology, resulting in a formal encoding of concepts, attributes, and relationships to support reusability and knowledge sharing.
This paper aims to address a gap in major Islamic topics by developing an ontology for the Book of Purification in Islam. Many authoritative Islamic texts begin with the Book of Purification, as it is essential for performing prayer (the second pillar of Islam after Shahadah, the profession of faith) and other religious duties such as Umrah and Hajj. The ontology development strategy followed six key steps: (1) domain identification, (2) knowledge acquisition, (3) conceptualization, (4) classification, (5) integration and implementation, and (6) ontology generation. This paper includes examples of the constructed tables and classifications. The focus is on the design and analysis phases, as technical implementation is beyond the scope of this study. However, an initial implementation is provided to illustrate the steps of the proposed strategy. The developed ontology ensures reusability by formally defining and encoding the key concepts, attributes, and relationships related to the Book of Purification. This structured representation is intended to support knowledge sharing and reuse.