Ontology for ethical issues in social networking sites based on Ibn Khaldun's thought in Al-Muqaddimah

Abstract

Numerous social networking sites (SNS) are accessible on the web have made a strong position in the hearts of millions of users and motivating them to interact with others. These sites are subjected to a great deal of theft of personal information, privacy issues and the revelation of everyday activities to unexpected people. Due to the harm caused by unethical users to exploit communication technology, users feel weak and defenseless, leading to anxiety and despair as a result of these immoral behaviours. This research focused to identify the ethical issues in tweets by developing the ontology based on Ibn Khaldun’s thoughts while validating and verifying the semantic relationship. The development of the ontology in this research includes four stages which highly influenced by the Methontology framework and the guideline of a practical guide to building Web Ontology Language (OWL) ontologies using Protégé. In the first and second phases of the requirement analysis stage, the document analysis method was performed where the thoughts of Ibn Khaldun from the Muqaddimah book were identified relating to humans and civilisation from his discourse then followed by expert verification. From these thoughts, the synonym words were identified by searching the Institute of Language and Literature (DBP) online thesaurus, also Google Trends was used to find the integration among Google search queries and data on Twitter. Then, the synonym words were set as a validated hashtag to be searched in collected tweets from Twitter through R-Programming. 1075 public’s tweets were collected and then the sentiment analysis in Parallel Dots was run on the collected tweets identified that 700 of the tweets are positive statements, 229 of the tweets are neutral statements and 146 of the tweets are negative statements. In the third phase of the development and implementation stage, the conceptual and formalisation of the ontology were identified and transformed into machine-readable representations. The Protégé OWL Editor version 5.5 was used in building a semantic relationship within the ontology. The fourth phase of the evaluation stage consists of four sub-stages: validation and verification following the selected guideline and criteria for evaluation; SPARQL Protocol and RDF Query Language (SPARQL) query testing, and user assessment. The interview was conducted with 3 experts to validate the ontology and verify the semantic relationship. In the end-user test, 20 respondents were chosen to complete the questionnaire. The described methodology has successfully developed the ontology consisting of 334 concepts and 1092 instances with a total of 4378 axioms for ethical issues in social networking sites based on Ibn Khaldun’s thoughts. The evaluation results included the positive endorsement and constructive judgement upon most of the ontology components. Through SPARQL query execution, the ontology model provided correct answers to all 146 competency questions. The ontology also generated a 62% suitable level through user assessment. This developed ontology model can help to provide an understanding of the structure and design of the ontology development of the ethical issues from the negative statements in tweets collected from Twitter and related to Ibn Khaldun’s thoughts as a solution. Further work included the expanded of Ibn Khaldun’s thoughts to a wider dimension of concepts and be extracted to a wider dimension of SNS medium.