A Novel Quranic Search Engine Using an Ontology-Based Semantic Indexing

Quran is the most significant religious document in the Arabic language in Islamic law. Several Quranic search engines have been designed and widely used for the past two decades. However, these search engines have certain limitations. For example, in many cases, the search is unable to retrieve relevant verses because it is based on keywords or root search and does not rely on the semantic relation between words in the query. The main objective of the present paper is to design a semantic search engine based on ontology as an index. In our work, we focus on creating a new ontology for Quranic document based on a set of useful words extracted from the Quranic Earab book with grammatical functions that serve as concepts. This ontology will be used as an index in information retrieval. The main idea is to create links between the existing Quranic words in the same verse, which will be used with user’s query to find the desired verses. We developed a graphical user interface with free and multiple inputs that convert users’ Arabic queries into SPARQL queries and then retrieve relevant verses from the ontology. The obtained results show that our proposal provides heightened precision and recall compared to other search engines.