Quantitative Assessment of Concept Maps for Conceptualizing Domain Ontologies: A Case of Quran

The use of graphical knowledge representation formalisms with a representational vocabulary agreement of terms of conceptualization of the universe of discourse is a new high potential approach in the ontology engineering and knowledge management context. Initially, concept maps were used in the fields of education and learning. After that, it became popular in other areas due to its flexible and intuitive nature. It was also proven as a useful tool to improve communication in corporate environment. In the field of ontologies, concept maps were explored to be used to facilitate different aspects of ontology development. An essential reason behind this motivation is the structural resemblance of concept maps with the hierarchical structure of ontologies. This research aims to demonstrate quantitative evaluation of 4 different hypotheses related to the effectiveness of using concept maps for ontology conceptualization. The domain of Quran was selected for the purpose of this study and it was conducted in collaboration with the experts from the Centre of Quranic Research, Universiti Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. The results of the hypotheses demonstrated that concept mapping was easy to learn and implement for the majority of the participants. Most of them experienced improvement in domain knowledge regarding the vocabularies used to refer to the structure of organization of the Quran, namely Juz, Surah, Ayats, tafsir, Malay translation, English translation, and relationships among these entities. Therefore, concept maps instilled the element of learning through the conceptualization process and provided a platform for participants to resolve conflicting opinions and ambiguities of terms used immediately.