Ontology-based model for Arabic lexicons: An application of the Place Nouns in the Holy Quran

Ontology is an explicit specification of conceptualization. It defines the terms with specified relationships between them and can be interpreted by both humans and computers. In general, there are scare semantic resources for Arabic language especially in Arabic ontologies. These semantic resources are very essential components in both Information Retrieval and Natural Language Processing applications like search engines, question answering, machine translation, etc. In recent years, many researchers are interested in building Arabic sematic resources, which are then can be exploited by others to build Arabic sematic applications. Recently, a proposed ontological model for “Time Nouns” vocabulary in the Holy Quran was introduced. To share towards building an integrated and unified ontology for Arabic language, in this paper, we are proposing an ontology-based model for Arabic language vocabulary associated with “Place Nouns” in the Holy Quran. This ontology is represented by the Web Ontology Language (OWL), which is the standard language for the semantic web. The ontology will be useful in the knowledge of the Islamic learning, linguistics researches, and Semantic Web applications.