Developing an Ontology of Arabic Islamic Legal Terminology for Nigerian Sharia Informatics: A Computational Linguistics Approach

The application of computational methods to Islamic legal scholarship, known as Sharia Informatics, requires the development of structured, machine-readable ontologies of Arabic Islamic legal terminology that accurately represent the conceptual architecture of Islamic jurisprudence in ways that support information retrieval, legal reasoning automation, and comparative fiqh analysis in the Nigerian Sharia court context. This study develops and evaluates an original ontology of Arabic Islamic legal terminology specifically designed for Nigerian Sharia informatics applications, combining expertise in Arabic linguistics, Islamic jurisprudence, ontology engineering, and computational linguistics. Using a participatory ontology construction methodology, the research assembles a multidisciplinary development team of three Arabic linguists, four Islamic law scholars, three computer scientists, and two Sharia court practitioners to collaboratively develop the ontological schema. The ontology construction draws on a corpus of 500 Classical Arabic fiqh texts relevant to Nigerian Sharia court practice, supplemented by contemporary Nigerian Sharia judgement corpora. Ontological relations are derived through iterative semantic analysis, expert validation, and automated consistency checking. The resulting ontology contains 4,200 defined terms, 18 top-level conceptual categories, and 15,000 semantic relations, and is validated through retrieval precision testing using a sample of 200 actual Nigerian Sharia court queries. The study makes original contributions to computational Islamic linguistics and Sharia informatics methodology. Keywords: Arabic legal ontology, Sharia Informatics, computational linguistics, Islamic jurisprudence, Nigeria.