Foreword

Abstract

By the grace of Allah, it is a great pleasure to introduce this issue 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 three papers. The first one is entitled: Sunnah Arabic Corpus: Design and Methodology. Sunnah Arabic Corpus is an annotated linguistic resource that consists of 144K words/170K tokens of the Hadith narratives (an utterance attributed to Prophet Mohammed) extracted from Riyāḍu Aṣṣāliḥīn book. As a first layer of annotation, the corpus has been fully diacritized. In addition, each orthographic word/token is segmented into its syntactic words. And each syntactic word is tagged with its part-of-speech in addition to multiple morphological features. Several hadith translations in different languages are provided and aligned at the narrative/paragraph level. Hadith Arabic Corpus follows the successful Quranic Arabic Corpus in its standards (corpus.quran.com). Sunnah Arabic Corpus is freely available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. 

The second paper is entitled: Issues in the Development of Patent Discovery System for Islamic Finance and Banking. This paper reports on the issues related to our work on developing patent discovery system for Islamic Finance and Banking. We aimed to identify the gaps at each stage of our system development.   These gaps expanded the scope of work beyond getting the ideal performance of our patent discovery system. Patents were explored on Islamic Finance and Banking as indexed in major patent databases. Patent retrieval and analysis plays an important role in determining the phases of patents using TRIZ Trend.  Findings showed that research in text analysis for Islamic Finance and Banking were rarely conducted; and that patents in Islamic Finance and Banking were facing critical issues. It was found that each of these issues calls for research-based solutions and for an appropriate organization of information and patent representations. It is suggested that concepts in Islamic Finance and Banking must grow in number, be appropriately organized, and experience semantic harmonization.

Editor-In-Chief