E-narrato-an application for creating an ontology of hadiths narration tree semantically and graphically

Abstract EN

For Muslims, Hadiths are the second source of Islamic jurisprudence after the Holy Qur’an.

Hadiths are narrations originating from the words and deeds of Prophet Muhammad.

There are two main components in each Hadith, the narration chain and the narrative text.

A hadith scholar judges a Hadith based on the narration chain and the individuals involved in the chain.

In this paper, we report on e-Narrator, an application that parses a plain Hadith text and automatically generates the full narration tree.

Our proposed solution involves parsing and annotating the Hadith text and recognizing the narrators’ names.

We use shallow parsing along with a domain specific grammar to parse the Hadith content.

Moreover, we use a transformation mechanism based on semantic web ontology to represent the narration chain in a standard format and then graphically render its complete tree.

Experiments on sample Hadiths show our approach to have a very good success rate.