SemanticHadith: An ontology-driven knowledge graph for the hadith corpus

Abstract

Hadith is an essential and much-celebrated resource for the Islamic domain. It is one of the two primary sources of Islamic legislation. The hadith corpus is quite large, consisting of the collection of sayings, actions and silent approval of the Prophet Muhammad. Minimal efforts have been made to date, towards unified semantic modelling, and knowledge representation of the hadith structure for enhanced interlinking and knowledge discovery. This paper presents the design, development and publishing of the hadith corpus as a knowledge graph. First, we design the SemanticHadith ontology to describe and relate core structural concepts from the hadith. We then publish the six prominent hadith collections as an RDF-Based hadith knowledge graph, which is an effort towards making the available hadith both human and machine-readable. This is the first step in the annotation and linking process of the hadith corpus aimed at enabling semantic search capabilities to support scholars, students, and researchers in the creation, evolution, and consultation of a digital representation of Islamic knowledge. The SemanticHadith knowledge graph is freely accessible at http://www.semantichadith.com.