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 of Ontology-Supported Approach for Judging Hadith Isnad

Isnad is the chain of narrators attesting to the historical authenticity of a particular hadith. It helps differentiate between the accepted and rejected hadiths. In this paper an ontology-based approach is developed to support the process of judging isnad. The approach applies the rules followed by hadith isnad scholars and depends on the hadith domain specific ontology built specially to represent narrators' knowledge. A prototype of the approach which is used to automatically generate a suggested judgment of hadith isnad is developed. The accuracy of the approach in judging has reached 80% and is evaluated through hadith examples and comparisons with hadith scholars' judgments.

The second paper is entitled of Non-authentic Hadith Corpus: Design and Methodology

This paper aimed to create a new NAH corpus which consists of 452,624 words from six different Hadith books. The subsequent aim is to annotate this corpus to determine some Hadith features such as the Isnad, the Matan and the Hadith authenticity and to provide a ground truth.

The third paper is entitled of Design & Architecture of a Multimodal Interactive Quran Application for Disabled Users

This paper reviews the literature on Quran and Islamic applications tailored to disabled users, and presents a flexible design, which overcomes some of the drawbacks found in previous techniques. Essentially, the proposed design is based on smart-devices and accesses multiple hardware sensors to provide users with multiple modes of interaction in order to achieve enhanced usability and flexibility, whilst avoiding many of the drawbacks found in other approaches. Some of the hardware sensors used within the multimodal application design includes; voice-interaction, head-motion interaction, device directional-movement interaction and touchscreen interaction. Finally, another notable advantage of this approach is evident in the potential scope and impact of our application for more general use with other learning content and courseware aimed at disabled users. 

The fourth paper is entitled of Content Management System on Prophetic Food with Multilingual Resources

This paper presents a Content management system (CMS) that manages a one-stop knowledge repository on prophetic food from various validated resources such as al-Quran and Hadith which are in Arabic, classical manuscript in Malay language either written in Roman or Jawi text and scientific articles which are in English. The knowledge sources were verified by domain experts. A semantic query dynamism was the key feature proposed in the CMS implemented as a proof of concept for the one-stop knowledge repository on prophetic food called Naqli Aqli Semantic Search Engine (NAISSE). The offline and online translation demonstrated the mechanism to match the query with the multilingual documents.

The fifth paper is entitled of Quality Impact of Online Database in Selected Universities in Malaysia:

The major objective of this research is to evaluate the effectiveness of library online databases. This study used a survey questionnaire to collect and the data was analyzed using SPSS (latest version). The results obtained showed that the subscription of library online database are still relevant in the academic environment.

Editor-In-Chief