Overview Qurany Explorer Technical Details Contact us Acknowledgment
Thank you very much for using Qurany to search the Holy Quran.
Qurany Explorer is a comprehensive tool that covers all the themes and concepts mentioned in the Quran. It is imported from 'Mushaf
Al Tajweed'.'Mushaf' is another name for the word 'Quran' in Arabic and 'Al-Tajweed' refers
to the rules for correctly reading the Quran in Arabic. The 'Mushaf Al Tajweed' contains a comprehensive hierarchical index or ontology of nearly
1200 concepts in the Quran. Scholars can use the Qurany ontology browser to identify a precise concept and find the verses which allude to this
concept, with higher precision. As mentioned above, 'Mushaf Al Tajweed' is published by Dar Al-Maarifah in Syria. It also has the authentication of Al-Azhar Islamic Research Academy in Cairo. All the English translations for the
concepts are obtained from the English translation of 'Mushaf Al Tajweed'. The list of concepts covers nearly 1200 concept. The Quran Explorer
is optimized for fast verses retrieval. However, you might find that a concept like 'Singularity of Allah(God)' might take up to 9 seconds to
load all the relevant verses. This is due to the fact that this concept is a major theme in the Holy Quran book and nearly 509 verses cover
this topic. Therefore, it is actually loading 509 Arabic Verses in addition to 509 * 8(= 4072) English translations. Otherwise, the Explorer
should retrieve verses within a second.
The English translations of the Quran used in this website have been tagged, tokenized and stemmed (using the Lancaster Stemmer)
to ensure accuracy as well as complete coverage of the Quran concepts. This was done using the Python Natural Language Toolkit.
AJAX(Asynchronous Javascript and XML) techniques have been adopted to guarntee fast data retrieval. AJAX techniques enable client
browser web pages to be updated with requested data on the fly, without having to reload the whole web page again. These techniques have been
used in retrieving keyword search results, importing children nodes for any parent node in the tree of concepts and also in fetching the
verses for a particular concept. The treeview control used is imported from Yahoo! User Interface Library which supports AJAX as well.
You can send all your comments and suggestions to Mrs. Noorhan Abbas(noorhanabbas@yahoo.co.uk)or to Dr.Eric Atwell(e.s.atwell @ leeds.ac.uk ). I am looking forward to receiving any information
about your experiences with this website. Please, let us know if this site needs more enhancements and in what way did you benefit from it.
A lot of hard work and much effort have been put into this site. Al Hamdullellah(thank God), this website is developed
using the best technology available. I would like to thank my supervisor Dr. Eric Atwell
for his continous and kind support. It has been a great pleasure working with Dr. Atwell. Work has always been fun to do under his supervision. He has
a distinguished and professional way of getting you to do much work and enjoying it at the same time! I will always be gratefull to your kindness and support. Thank you again very much.
I would also like to thank Mr. Clay Smith for providing the invaluable
English translations for the Quran. Without your effort in collecting the different English translations for the Holy Quran, this website would have always been just a dream.
"The Koran is universally accepted by Muslims to be the infallible Word of God as first revealed by the Angel Gabriel nearly fourteen hundred
years ago. Its 114 chapters, or surahs, recount the narratives central to Muslim belief, ... above all, the Koran provides the rules of conduct
that remain fundamental to the Muslim faith today" (Dawood, 2006). Corpus linguists commonly use Key-Word-In-Context search tools to find
examples of a word in a corpus, to study uses of that word. The billion Muslims (and other interested non-Muslims) who study the Quran may well
want to examine uses of a given word, and there are several online search tools which can show them all the verses where a term appears.
However, the Quran is not just used for the study of words in the original Arabic text. Scholars and other users of Quran search tools may
want to search for concepts rather than specific Arabic letter-sequences. Some Quran search websites allow search of an English translation,
to allow non-Arabic-speakers to use English keywords to search for verses containing a concept; but there are a number of variant translations,
including a variety of transliterations of Arabic names (eg Jibril / Jibrail / Gabriel), so this only works if the English translation uses the
specified keyword for the concept sought.
The Quran corpus is augmented
with an ontology or index of key concepts, taken from a recognized expert source. Expert knowledge used in annotating the Quran corpus is obtained
from 'Mushaf Al Tajweed', compiled by Dr. Mohamed Habash, Director of the Islamic Studies Centre in Damascus, published by Dar Al-Maarifah in Syria
and authenticated by the Al-Azhar Islamic Research Academy in Egypt.
Furthermore, it is the only tool that allows users to search the Quran corpus for abstract concepts via an ontology browser.
Qurany is implemented using a combination of technologies including the NLTK Python Natural Language ToolKit, Google Python AppEngine, AJAX
Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, and Yahoo! User Interface Library. Literary scholars have devised indexes of key concepts for other corpora,
eg the works of Shakespeare; The Qurany system could be adapted to search-by-concept of these literary texts.
Qurany Explorer
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A BIG thank you to my soul mate, my husband, Ashraf. You always believed that I could do it! Your moral support (also your financial supprot!!) and ideas have always inspired me
and kept me going. I am very lucky indeed to have you in my life. My mum, dad and my brother, words will not be enough to describe how much
I am blessed to have your support and love. My lovley children: Hania and Omar, I hope this website will help you better understand the Holy
Quran. Hania, you have helped me with the logo of the website. Your remarks were always valuable...I can see a young talented software engineer in you. God
bless you both.
Thank you to Mr. Majdi Swalha (my collegue in the university), Mr. Mohamed Tayseer (Python Mailing list), Mr. Satyam(Yahoo User Interface Mailing list),
and Mr. Alex Martelli(google group) for your invaluable help and advice.
A warm thank you to the talented graphics designer Mohammed Shaker Sawalha. He designed and implemented the Arabic Logo for the Qurany website which
added much charm..
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