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New approach to present Holy Quran stories and events using Web application
based on Geographic Information System

Conference Paper · December 2013

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Mabrouk Yermani Khemiri Walid

King Abdulaziz University
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 New approach to present Holy Quran stories and
events using Web application based on Geographic
Information System
1
Mabrouk El Yarmani, 2 Walid Khemiri, 3Reda Yaagoubi
Department of Geomatics, Faculty of Environmental Design.
King Abdulaziz University
Saudi Arabia
1
melyarmani@kau.edu.sa; 2wkhemiri@kau.edu.sa; 3ryaagoubi@kau.edu.sa
Abstract— Over the recent years, we notice an increasing number
of web applications dealing with the holy Quran. Most of these
applications include Quran pages, synched with audio files from
many reciters, translations in different languages and a few
sources of tafseer. This paper aims to present a new approach of
presenting Quran events and stories by using a web application
based on Geographic Information Systems. Our novel approach
is an interesting manner for discovering the Holy Quran, either
for Muslim or non-Muslim, through a spatio-temporal
localization of stories and events. A Geodatabase was designed
and created for this purpose including relevant components such
as verses, surah, event, story, files, etc. This Geodatabase was
implemented on a GIS web server where Spatial Data were
enriched by images, audio and video files.
Keywords: Geographic Information System; Web GIS; Holy
Quran; Quran stories, Geographic Quran Events.
Introduction
It’s very important to find new attractive ways to present the
Holy Quran for people over the World, especially for non-
Muslims. For this purpose, many web applications were
developed in recent year to reach. Spreading the teachings of
the Holy Quran through the web facilitates reaching a large
number of people over the world. Of course, thanks to the
guidance of ALLAH in the first place, web applications for the
Holy Quran are one of the fundamental reasons for the
increased number of non-Muslims that embrace Islam. In
keeping with this trend, we present in this paper an innovative
idea to present the Holy Quran on internet by using Web
Geographic Information System (Web-GIS). The main
purpose this Web-GIS applications consists of a spatio-
temporal localization of the Holy Quran stories and events.
In order to appeal human beings hearts and minds, the holy
Quran has used a number of approaches. Story telling is
among the styles of dialogue the Holy Quran use to guide
people to the truth and the Straight Path of ALLAH.
Our proposed solution offer access to stories and events
location by a geographical interface with world map. Users
can make a search on map by selecting an area. They can also
make queries by date, by period of time, by surah or by story.
A verse containing the ‘meaning’ of place will be displayed
and a link to the hole Surah is then available.
I. WEB GEOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION SYSTEM
Geographic Information Systems (GIS) are systems that allow
acquiring, managing, analyzing, and presenting spatially
related information (Coors, 1998). A GIS software is used to
convert diverse data into easy to-read and easy-to-access maps
and information. In addition, the benefits of the world wide
web are numerous, however, the two primary advantages is
that the web is time independence and spatial independence
(Mohler and Duff, 1999). As consequence, it is possible to
access to the information, wherever one is and whatever the
time is. In addition, distributing data over the web is more
efficient than transmitting data through disks or Books. For
these reasons, we consider that combining the benefits and the
strengths of the Web and GIS will provide a powerful manner
for accessing, sharing, disseminating and analyzing geospatial
data. Hence, technologies related to web dissemination of GIS
data, such as Web GIS, Open GIS and Distributed GIS are
growing rapidly and increasingly in the recent years (Honda,
2003).
II. ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN AND SOFTWARE
The architecture of the system developed is made up of four
major components. It follows an architecture that is similar to
other web-based system such as that described by (Bapna and
Gangopadhyay, 2005). An overview of the architecture is
illustrated in the figure below. This architecture consists of
four elements; a presentation layer, an application layer, a data
layer and a map-generation layer.
Presentation
Data
Layer Layer
Web
GIS Service
Data Mapping
Layer
Base
Application
Layer
Figure 1. Web-based System Architecture
Our proposed application is based on JAVA/J2EE technology
combined with other open source software (JBoss, Geoserver,
Geotools, Hibernate, OpenLayers, PostGres, PostGis, etc.) :
GeoServer is a Geographic information Server developed
in Java. This Server is implemented with respect to OGC
specifications concerning WMS Services (Web Map
Service) and WFS (Web Feature Service).
:
GeoTools is a free software (LGPL) GIS toolkit for
developing standards compliant solutions. It provides an
implementation of Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC)
specifications as they are developed.
OpenLayers is a compilation of Javascript libraries for
building Web-GIS applications, implementing standard
methods for Data access, as OpenGIS consortium
Protocols (Web Mapping Service (WMS) and Web
Feature Service (WFS)).
Hibernate is an Open source framework for management
and database object persistence. Logic and business
processes operate independently of the database used. By
using this framework, the changes in the database
(PostgreSQL, MySQL, Oracle, SqlServer) become very
simple.
JBoss and Apache Tomcat are server applications that
implement the Java Platform, Enterprise Edition (Java
EE).
MGeoServer is a N-Tier J2EE architecture with MVC
conception. It integrates Geoserver as a mapping engine
and JBoss as an application engine.
The diagram below summarizes the architecture of our
solution based on the chosen technologies:
Figure2. The architecture of the proposed WebGIS and
the chosen technologies
III. DATA ACQUISITION
GIS software use two types of data; Vector and Raster. On the
one hand, vector data mainly consist of three primitives which
are; point, line and polygon. These primitives are generally
attached to one or many descriptive tables. On the other hand,
raster data represent geographical phenomena as a grid cells
(or pixels) where each cell encodes a value that corresponds to
the geographical phenomenon. In our implemented WebGIS
application, we’ve used images (in raster format) from Google
earth. Then, vector layers that represent features such as cities,
counties or tribes boundaries, and specific events can be added
above Google images. The spatial location of some features
may not be sufficiently accurate because some of them need
field mission in order to acquire accurate positions. At the
same time, some places, such as ‘the sacred valley fold’
couldn’t be located exactly. Hence, a kind of fuzzy
representation is necessary to spatially represent this type of
data. The proposed web application can be a way to improve
positions and information. The spatial location of places and
event are mainly taken from dedicated web sites and the
reference book ‘Atlas Al Quran’ (Abu Khalil, 2003).
In order to link the Holy Quran event and stories with their
spatial locations, a Geodatabase hase been designed for this
purpose. In this Geodatabase, we’ve taken into consideration
the spatial relationship between locations, verses and surat.
Some photos of locations were also added to our Geodatabase
in order to give more useful information to visitors (ideos can
be also added).
VI. APPLICATION INTERFACE
The interface of our WebGIS contains three main functions:
search, display and translation. A frame for displaying layers
was also created with enabling/disabling option to show or
hide one or more layers. Furthermore, the interface allows
users to add data, documents, comments, etc. in a
collaborative manner in order to improve the quality and the
amount of useful data.

Figure 3. The interface of the proposed WebGIS application
V. CONCLUSION
In this paper, we’ve presented a web-based geographic
information system that presents the Holy Quran Events and
Stories, and their spatio-temporal localization. Our application
is designed to allow viewing, querying, and editing events,
stories and their locations and other useful information related
to these stories and events. This solution is based on a
Server/Client architecture and doesn’t require any commercial
GIS software. In addition, the interface is very easy to use
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especially for people with little internet and GIS knowledge.
Furthermore, visitors have free access to the data, and several
predefined queries can be performed over the internet. Our
WebGIS application offers interesting and useful
functionalities without required knowledge. Finally, we hope
that this work is a first step towards designing a complete and
powerful Web-GIS solution that will serve to strengthen the
relation between Muslims and the Holy Quran, and also to
invite non-Muslims to learn more about Islam
REFERENCES
V. Coors, 1998. Using wearable gis in outdoor applications, Extended
abstract on international workshop for interactive applications of
mobile computing, Germany.
K. Honda, 2003. Digital ASIA Concept and Activity, Proceedings of
the Regional Conference on DIGITAL GMS, Thailand.
http://www.star.ait.ac.th/~honda/pub.html (accessed 26 Apr. 2004)
J.L. Mohler, and J.M. Duff, 1999. Designing Interactive Web Sites.
Publishing, NY, USA.
C.Abu khalil, 2003. Atlas Holy Quran, Dar al Fikr.