Foreword

Abstract

By the grace of Allah, it is a great pleasure to introduce the issue No. 23 which is the first in the Seventh volume 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 two papers. The first one is entitled: Learning to Rank for Arabic Transcriptions Retrieval. With the ingoing improvement in the speech recognizers accuracy, this research addresses the problem of ranking transcriptions that can be obtained by speech recognizers to enhance search engine ranking results. Depending on the title of the video and some of its meta-data only is not sufficient for some queries that have the information need to get relevant spoken segments within audio files. Feature extraction based on both the meta-data of the spoken documents and the timed spoken content transcription for an Arabic audio dataset for Quran is proposed. The results revealed that applying learning to rank techniques are superior to the baseline unsupervised BM25 scoring. In addition, using transcription-based features proved its effectiveness in terms of both the Normalized Discounted Cumulative Gain (NDCG@10) and Expected Reciprocal Rank (ERR@10). 

The second paper is entitled: Utilizing GIS for Modeling Sharia Compliant Proximity in a Smart City. This research aims to explore, analyses and study the best locations to create a simplified model ‎of smart cities in the framework of Islamic Sharia. This indicates the importance of ‎communication with technological development for some important tourist services such as ‎hotels in Kuala Lumpur compliant with Islamic Sharia. The study analyzed the visitors' favorite ‎sites through the use of GIS, the analysis revealed that the central region for the division of the ‎study comprise the biggest part of tourism services. The study also concludes by using the ‎statistical program (SPSS) which resulted in a positive relationship between the real-time orientation of ‎the community, the quality of life and services of the city with the requirements of Islamic ‎Sharia for the Smart City.

Editor-In-Chief