Researchers at the International Islamic University Malaysia have developed a search engine that can help users find authenticated Islamic content on the Internet. WiSeMantiQ® sifts through online content related to tasawuf (Sufism), Islamic family law, Islamic finance and banking, Qur`an and Hadith, and supplications, according to its degree of endorsement by national and international experts. The research team has added community features that welcome users to contribute to the authenticated Islamic content development process. WiSeMantiQ® accepts users’ suggested links to online content endorsed by experts.
WiSeMantiQ® search engine is built in consideration of authenticated Islamic content in comparison to other popular and semantic-based search engines. Information dissemination must be guided by an Islamic worldview. Authenticated Islamic contents are critical in teaching-and-learning, research, and daily life. Such contents are hard to find due to users’ limited knowledge of the appropriate search terms, and due to scattered quality search results. As required by Islamic faith, Muslims practice citations to original sources with chain of authorities and validated interpretations. Authenticated Islamic content refers to information guided by Qur’an and Hadith and accepted by scholars. Non-authenticated content refers to information that appears doubtful and requires expert endorsement. Users often found content overloaded with information and opinions, lacked access to Islamic references and scholars, and have limited knowledge to decide on the quality of the results from an Islamic perspective.
WiSeMantiQ® visualisation assists users with the quality concepts
WiSeMantiQ® clusters results into reliable and non-committal. It is designed to allow users to visualize the quality of search results, so they can select the most accurate and continue with further lateral searches. The research team has added a dashboard that can help users analyse the performance of their search terms. WiSeMantiQ® displays users’ search terms and results as data visualization.
The researchers designed WiSeMantiQ® search engine to solve issues related to finding hidden and scattered authentic contents and to knowing the doubtful ones. They constructed the ontology and its collections from authenticated sources endorsed by experts, designed the feeder for users to contribute links to online contents, developed the automated crawling technique for getting the contents, indexed the Islamic contents identified from the Web, designed an interface to enable users formulate an ontology-based and free-text queries, filtered the search results into reliable and non-committal clusters, and designed the dashboard and visualisation for users to see the overall picture of their search results.
200 users tested the search engine on multiple devices, such as on Maxis-Celcom devices and MyRen servers. The search engine won a gold medal and a special award from INNOPA Indonesia at Malaysia Technology Expo 2016.
For further information contact:
Professor Roslina Othman
Semantic Body of Knowledge and Technology Research Unit
International Islamic University Malaysia
