Ontology Development for "Sufism" Domain

Domain ontology is a descriptive representation of any particular domain which in detail describes the concepts in a domain, the relationships among those concepts and organizes them in a hierarchal manner. It is also defined as a structure of knowledge, used as a means of knowledge sharing to the community. An Important aspect of using ontologies is to make information retrieval more accurate and efficient. Thousands of domain ontologies from all around the world are available online on ontology repositories. Ontology repositories like SWOOGLE currently have over 1000 ontologies covering a wide range of domains. It was found that up to date there was no ontology available covering the domain of "Sufism". This unavailability of "Sufism" domain ontology became a motivation factor for this research. This research came up with a working "Sufism" domain ontology as well a framework, design of the proposed framework focuses on the resolution to problems which were experienced while creating the "Sufism" ontology. The development and working of the "Sufism" domain ontology are covered in detail in this research. The word "Sufism" is a term which refers to Islamic mysticism. One of the reasons to choose "Sufism" for ontology creation is its global curiosity. This research has also managed to create some individuals which inherit the concepts from the "Sufism" ontology. The creation of individuals helps to demonstrate the efficient and precise retrieval of data from the "Sufism" domain ontology. The experiment of creating the "Sufism" domain ontology was carried out on a tool called Protege. Protege is a tool which is used for ontology creation, editing and it is open source.