You are here: UK Essays » Essays » Information Systems » Zakat Management System

Cookie Information

Privacy Information

Zakat Management System

Ontology of Zakat Management System

ABSTRACT

Zakat Management System is a system that manages all the processes that are involved in zakat activities. At present, there exist no standard which can be utilized to develop Zakat Management System.

In order to support the development of Zakat Management System, this paper provides the ontology of Zakat Management System aimed specifically to share the knowledge of zakat. Each person who are involved in the development of this system will hopefully share a common understanding of Zakat Management System. This in turn will make the process of development faster.

Keywords

Ontology, Zakat Management System, Methontology

1.0 INTRODUCTION

Ontology can be defined as a collection of term (concepts) and their definitions stated in a natural language (Kalinichenko et al., 2003). Ontology may take a variety of forms, but necessarily it will include a vocabulary of terms, and some specification of their meaning. This includes definitions and an indication of how concepts are inter-related which collectively impose a structure on the domain and constrain the possible interpretations of terms (Uschold, 1998).

Zakat is the forth of the Five Pillars of Islam. Zakat refers to spending a fixed portion of one's wealth for the poor and needy in the society. Giving money for charity is highly commendable, however zakat is different because it is obligatory on all Muslims and is given in a calculated amount.

2.0 METHODOLOGY

The Zakat Management System ontology described in this paper has been developed using METHONTOLOGY (Fernandez Lopez et al., 1997). This ontology is based on the widely used terms and concepts in the zakat domain. We attempt to include all of the important concepts in zakat domain, as follows:

• We have considered all the processes that were involved in zakat management, which are the amil/agent constitution, zakat collection, budget allocation and zakat distribution.

• We have established relationships between all the concepts available from the same point of view.

We have tried to cover the most common cases in Zakat Management System. The current version of the Zakat Management System ontology is the results from analyzing the services provided by zakat centers in Malaysia. From this analysis we have extracted the most representative concepts, unifying the different ways used to express them and removing duplicates.

2.1 Framework

There are four major activities involved (refer to figure 1):

Phase 1: Literature review - review the past and current researches which are related to zakat management. Study and compare various methodology of ontology development and select appropriate methodology.

Phase 2: Data collection and preparation - data and information are collected through literature review and through interview with individual from several zakat center i.e. Lembaga Zakat Selangor, Pusat Zakat Wilayah Persekutuan, Pusat Zakat Kedah and Pusat Zakat Perlis.

Phase 3: Domain Analysis and Modeling - model the zakat management system using Unified Modeling Language (UML) to understand the overall view of zakat management domain.

Phase 4: Ontology Development - model the zakat domain knowledge and represent it in a conceptual form, define the concepts and relationships between concepts. By using a tool named Protégé, we convert it into RDF/XML language.

Figure 1: Framework

2.2 Methontology

METHONTOLOGY guides in how to carry out the whole ontology development through the specification, the conceptualization, the formalization, the implementation and the maintenance of the ontology. We now describe briefly each activities that are included in the Zakat Management System ontology development process:

2.2.1 Specification

The specification activity states why the ontology is being built, what its intended uses and who the end-users are. The Zakat Management System Ontology goal is:

To share domain information. Ontology binds the different communities in the software development to overcome barriers created by disparate vocabularies, approaches, representations, and tools in their respective contexts.

To be used as a basis for software specification and development Ontology solves this problem by bridging the gap between domain analysis and application system construction.

Zakat Management System Ontology is designed for interoperability of systems. In the next sections the process to conceptualize an ontology of entities (amil, agent, etc.) in the zakat management domain will be presented.

2.2.2 Conceptualization, Formalization, Implementation and Maintenance

The conceptualization activity in METHONTOLOGY organizes and converts an informally perceived view of a domain into a semi -formal specification using a set of intermediate representations (IRs) based on tabular and graph notations that can be understood by domain experts and ontology developers. The result of the conceptualization activity is the ontology conceptual model.

The formalization activity transforms the conceptual model into a formal or semi-computable model. Formalization is not a mandatory activity, because using ontology tools the conceptualization model is usually automatically implemented with translators to ontology languages.

The implementation activity builds computable models in an ontology language (Ontolingua) (Farquhar et al., 1997), RDF Schema (Brickley & Guha, 2004), OWL (Chaudhri et al., 1998), etc.). Tools implemented automatically on conceptual models have varieties of ontology languages. This ontology has been implemented in OWL since it has been modeled with the Protégé tool.

The maintenance activity updates and corrects the ontology if needed.

3.0 FINDINGS

Ontology Development Using METHONTOLOGY

The zakat management ontology is composed of several ontologies at different levels of abstraction: application, collection, distribution, documents and users.

Below is the example of Application Ontology (refer to figure 2 and table 1), Collection (refer to figure 3 and table 2), Distribution (refer to figure 4 and table 3, Document (refer to figure 5 and table 4) and User (refer to figure 6 and table 5). Figure 7 shows the example of computable model in an ontology language (OWL).

Figure 2: Concept Classification Tree - Application

Table 1: Terms Glossary - Application

Figure 3: Concept Classification Tree - Collection

Table 2: Terms Glossary - Collection

Figure 4: Concept Classification Tree - Distribution

Table 3 : Terms Glossary - Distribution

Figure 5: Concept Classification Tree - Document

Table 4 : Terms Glossary - Document

Figure 6: Concept Classification Tree - User

Table 7 : Terms Glossary - User

Figure 7 : OWL

4.0 CONCLUSION

This ontology will make the process of understanding and developing the Zakat Management System faster.

This ontology only covers two main processes in zakat management:

• Collection

• Distribution

This ontology can be updated by including more processes that are involved in zakat management such as Customer Relationship Management.

REFERENCES

Aguado, J., Bernaras, A., Smithers, T., Pedrinaci, C., & Cendoya, M. (2003). Using Ontology Research in Semantic Web Applications : A Case Study. Paper presented at the 10th Conference of the Spanish Association for Artificial Intelligence, CAEPIA 2003, and 5th Conference on Technology Transfer, TTIA 2003, San Sebastian, Spain.

Ahmad, A. (2003). Ontologies for Supply Chain Management. Unpublished Masters Thesis, University Of Central Florida, Florida.

Brickley, D., & Guha, R. V. (2004). RDF Vocabulary Description Language 1.0: RDF Schema.W3C Recommendation. Retrieved March 15, 2006, fromhttp://www.w3.org/TR/PR-rdf-schema

Falbo, R. A., Guizzardi, G., Duarte, K. C., & Natali, A. C. C. (2002). Developing Software for and with Reuse: An Ontological Approach. Paper presented at the ACIS International Conference on Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Technology, e-Business, and Applications, Foz do Iguacu, Brazil.

Farquhar, A., Fikes, R., & Rice, J. (1997). The Ontolingua Server: A Tool for Collaborative Ontology Construction. International Journal of Human Computer Studies 46(6), 707-727.

Fernández-López, M., Gómez-Pérez, A., Juristo, N. (1997). Methontology: From Ontological Art Towards Ontological Engineering. Paper presented at the Spring Symposium on Ontological Engineering of AAAI. Stanford University, California.

Fernández-López, M., Gómez-Pérez, A., Pazos, A., & Pazos, J. (1999). Building a Chemical Ontology Using Methontology and the Ontology Design Environment. IEEE Intelligent Systems & their applications 4(1), 37- 46.

Gruber, T. (2001). What is an Ontology. Retrieved March 15, 2006,

from http://www-ksl.stanford.edu/kst/what-is-an-ontology.html

Guarino, N. & Giaretta, P. (1995). Ontologies and Knowledge Bases: Towards a Terminological Clarification. In N. Mars (Ed), Towards Very Large Knowledge Bases: Knowledge Building and Knowledge Sharing (pp. 25-32).The Netherlands: IOS Press.

Heflin, J., Hendler, J., & Luke, S. (1999). Applying Ontology to the Web: A Case Study. Paper presented at the International Work-Conference on Artificial and Natural Neural Networks, IWANN'99, Alicante, Spain.

Holsapple, W. C., & Joshi, K. D. A. (2002). Collaborative approach to ontology design. Communication of the ACM, 45(2), 42 - 47.

Jasper, R., & Uschold, M. (1999). A Framework for Understanding and Classifying Ontology Applications. Paper presented at the 13th Workshop on Knowledge Acquisition,Modelling and Management (KAW'99), Alberta, Canada.

Kalinichenko, L., Missikoff, M., Schiappeli, F., & Skvortsov, N. (2003). Ontological Modeling. Paper presented at the 5th Russian Conference on Digital Libraries RCDL2003, St-Petersburg, Russia.

Knublauch, H. (2003). Editing Semantic Web Content with Protégé: the OWL Plugin. Paper presented at the 6^th Protégé workshop. Manchester, United Kingdom.

Kogut, P., Cranefield, F., Hart, L., Dutra, M., Baclawski, K., Kokar, M., & Smith, J. (2002). UML for Ontology Development. Knowledge Engineering Journal, 17(1), 61-64.

Li, S. T., Hsieh, H. Chih., & Sun, I. W. (2003). An Ontology-based Knowledge Management System for the Metal Industry. Paper presented at the Twelfth International World Wide Web Conference, Budapest, Hungary.

Prestes, R., Carvalho, G., Paes, R., Lucena, C., & Endler, M. (2004). Applying Ontologies in Open Mobile Systems. Paper presented at the OOPSLA'04 Workshop on Building Software for Pervasive Computing, Vancouver, Canada.

Sowa, J. F. (2000). Knowledge Representation: Logical, Philosophical, and Computational Foundations. Pacific Grove, CA: Brooks Cole.

Sign up and be the first to receive our latest offers: