Foreword

Abstract

By the grace of Allah, it is a great pleasure to introduce the issue No. 21 which is the second in the Sixth volume of: The International Journal on Islamic Applications in Computer Science and Technology.

The success and the welcome of this Journal by researchers from many countries, gave us great encouragement for continuing issuing in the due time.

This Journal is aimed at publishing original research papers in the field of Islamic Applications in computer science and technology. This field is catching a momentum in the recent years. As a Journal interested in this field, it is the first International Journal of its specific field. As research is growing in this field, we hope that this Journal will be a platform for researchers working in the field to publish their research.

This issue contains two papers. The first one is entitled: Convergence and Divergence between Knowledge Management and Hadith Management Process. Knowledge management has been in practice for a while in our societies apart from our knowledge, although we all have practiced it while we share information with each other. Being Muslim, we have always read Hadith and have had listened in how it was collected, stored, and shared with all over the world among Muslims. Hadith were collected in such a perfect and accurate process which assures us how conscientiously it could be shared among people. However, knowledge management handling compared to Hadith management process lacks behind in terms of process, authentication, verification and collaboration. Hadith management process is a good lesson to learn from. The steps taken to verify and authenticate Hadith and ownership in transmission contributed significantly to the quality of Hadith we have today. Following Hadith knowledge process may eliminate or at reduce the big failure in knowledge management implementation and deployment in several organizations. 

The second paper is entitled: Ontology based Similarity for Case Based Reasoning in Islamic Banking. The goal of this article is to present an Ontology based Similarity approach for a Case Based Reasoning system to assist Mufti in the process of retrieving old Fatawa to reuse them or to generate new ones. The system allows the user to ask a question and get the case base to be searched for old Fatawa fitting with the question. The case memory contains Fatawa generated by experts in Fiqh Islamic Banking domain. The question is asked by the user in an assisted mode. The system analyzes the question not only syntactically but also semantically. An application ontology was created for this purpose. This last adds a value to the system by describing the domain knowledge and providing systematized knowledge and machine readable vocabulary of the domain. The proposed system measures similarity between situations by applying the ontology.

Editor-In-Chief