Station 1 — The source itself, not a copy of it
Books enter from the critically edited digital editions of the Ahlulbayt Library, with their original structural markup: page breaks, footnote blocks, tables of contents, and the complete book card (author and death year, editor, edition, publisher, volume). The card is parsed automatically from the file itself, so citation data is never typed in by hand.
Station 2 — Structural ingestion that preserves the book’s fabric
Every numbered footnote is merged into the body text at its exact anchor, tagged; a narrator’s biography stays attached to its place in the chain of transmission wherever the text is later split. Editors’ unanchored remarks are tagged separately, commentary blocks likewise, and the full hierarchy — book, chapters, sections — is rebuilt, including headings that appear only in the table of contents.
Station 3 — Semantic chunking that carries its own citation
Text is split at meaning boundaries, and every passage carries in its metadata: book, author, volume, page number, its heading path, and its nature (body text, footnoted, commentary, editor’s note). Citation is not a garnish added at display time — it is a structural property of every passage from birth.
Station 4 — Dual retrieval, then reranking
Two engines together: a semantic one that understands meaning across phrasings, and a lexical Arabic one that pins down the exact scholastic term — fused by reciprocal rank, then refined by a state-of-the-art reranker. A text is lost neither to a colloquial question nor to a rare term.
Station 5 — When no text exists: honesty, not invention
The corpus does not compose, infer or patch. When nothing relevant exists it says so plainly: “No relevant results in the Moheet corpus.” A corpus that knows its limits is more trustworthy than one that answers everything.
Archival integrity: versioning and supersession
Every file has a SHA-256 fingerprint governing its lifecycle: duplicates are rejected automatically; a newer edition of a book replaces the old one atomically, never leaving a mixture of two versions; a critically edited text edition always supersedes a scanned one; and nothing is ever silently deleted — superseded material is flagged and preserved as an audit trail.
Standards we adhere to
We review Moheet's texts and book records against recognised international standards, so that every text reaches you accurately and attributed to its book, author, volume and page. These are standards whose methods we follow; they are not formal certifications.
ISO/IEC 25012
Data quality
An international standard for the accuracy and completeness of data. We use it to check that each book's title, author, editor and volume match the book itself.
IFLA LRM
Library Reference Model
The model of the International Federation of Library Associations. We use it to tell editions of the same book apart, so one edition is never confused with another in your citations.
ISO 2859-1
Sampling inspection
An international standard for quality control. We use it to check the corpus regularly and measurably, not only once when a book is added.
OpenITI · KITAB
Arabic heritage corpora
The method of the leading academic projects digitising the Arabic textual heritage. We use it to keep each author under one name and to stop the same book appearing twice in your results.
“Precise attribution is scholarly integrity before it is a technical feature.”