Quranic Ontologies: A Scoping Review of the Applications

The purpose is to provide a comprehensive view of the applications of Quranic ontologies, through the identification and analysis of research related to the various uses of operational Quranic ontologies, for researchers in the theoretical and practical fields. Based on this, the aim of the authors has been to provide a practical and operational representation of the shortcomings, problems and suggestions raised in the field of the application of existing Quranic ontologies by studying previous projects in order to provide the conditions for maximum use of the capabilities of Quranic ontologies.

The current research is a systematic review of the scoping type, which highlighted the use of Quranic ontologies in previous studies. The methodological framework of Arksey & O'Malley (2005), who have provided five suggested steps for conducting domain review research, was used for this purpose. At April 2022, a search was conducted in 6 databases including Emerald, Science Direct, IEEE Xplore Digital Library, Google Scholar, Web of Science, and Scopus and as a result, 811 studies were identified. To organize the studies, information resource management software (Endnote) was used. Using the mentioned software, 317 duplicate articles were identified and by studying the title and abstract of retrieved sources, 362 articles were removed due to being unrelated to the purpose of the study. Then, the full text of the articles was studied and the inclusion and exclusion criteria were applied, and as a result, 118 articles were excluded. Finally, 14 articles were included in the review.

The findings of the research show that the ontology of Quranic sciences is useful in the design of semantic search engines, the development of conversational systems in natural language and the disambiguation of user queries in natural language, voice recognition and evaluation of Quranic recitation, linking Quranic verses with Web multimedia sources.

Considering the positive results of the application of Quranic ontologies in different areas, it can be argued that with the help of semantic technologies, including the comprehensive ontology of the contextual knowledge of the Quran, the publication Quranic knowledge has been realized and users can be guided to recover Quranic knowledge. Therefore, it is necessary to design and develop a comprehensive Quranic ontology in Persian language as a basis for the applications mentioned in previous researches, such as dialogue systems in natural Persian language and the design of a semantic search engine in Persian language.