Searching Halal Food Information from Distributed Databases: An Architecture of a Barcode Scanning Application using Smartphones

摘要

This study presents the architecture of a mobile application that accesses information from external databases. The application is intended for users in Malaysia to search halal information of food products by scanning the product barcode using their smartphone camera. Currently, the users use a mobile application provided by the Halal authority for this purpose. The application performs text-based searching according to the product names supplied by the users. The major limitation of the application is the accuracy of the user?s searching key words due to input errors. This limitation can be improved by automatically scanning of product barcode using smartphone camera. Unfortunately, the product barcode information is not available in the Halal authority?s database. Hence, the barcode information must be obtained from external databases and a link should be made to the Halal authority database. In designing the architecture, the Attribute-Driven Design method was adapted. The features of the other existing applications in the world were studied to identify the attributes that could improve the current application. The output of this method is the architectural design of the application that shows the components and communication flow between them.