Muhadith: A Cloud Based Distributed Expert System for Classification of Ahadith

Abstract

This paper presents a novel approach for the classification of the religious scriptures, the Hadith (sayings of Prophet Muhammad (plural Ahadith)). Muhadith is a distributed, Cloud based expert system that uses the Hadith science to classify Ahadith among 24 types from seven broad categories. Classification of the Hadith is a complex and sensitive task, and can only be performed by an expert of the Hadith sciences. Muhadith expert system is designed to imitate the Hadith experts for Hadith classification, and to enable a computer to behave like a Hadith expert to discriminate the authentic Ahadith from unauthentic ones. This paper presents the relationship and mapping of the expert system technology onto Hadith sciences, and technicalities involved in designing of the Muhadith expert system. We also propose solutions for the communicational and interoperability problems faced by the legacy web based distributed expert systems. We employ service oriented architecture to overcome the communicational problem and a candidature for the Software as a Service (SaaS) for the Cloud computing. The expert system also provides a reasoning facility that enables the user to look into the classification details. Muhadith expert system has been designed by merging the ideas from the domains of expert systems, Web technologies, and distributed computing systems. This type of an effort on the topic is rare and applying them in the domain of Hadith is our humble contribution.