Semantic Hadith: Leveraging Linked Data Opportunities for Islamic Knowledge

While the linked data paradigm has gathered much attention over the recent years, the domain of Islamic knowledge has yet to cache upon its full potential. The web-scale integration of Islamic texts and knowledge sources at large is currently not well facilitated. The two primary sources of the Islamic legislation are the Qur’an and the Hadith (collections of Prophetic Narrations) and form the basis of laying the foundation for anyone wanting to learn Islam. This paper presents ongoing design and development efforts to semantically model and publish the Hadith, which holds a primary position as the next most important knowledge source, after the Qur’an. We present the design of the linked data vocabulary for not only publishing these narrations as linked data, but also delineate upon the mechanism for linking these narrations with the verses of the Qur’an. We establish how the links between the Hadith and the Qur’anic verses may be captured and published using this vocabulary, as derived from the secondary and tertiary sources of knowledge. We present detailed insights into the potential, the design considerations and the use cases of publishing this wealth of knowledge as linked data. CCS Concepts •Information systems→Multilingual and cross-lingual retrieval; Information extraction; •Computing methodologies → Ontology engineering;