Abstract:
Muslims are concerned with the Halal status of food products
sold in the supermarkets. Many products that are imported from overseas are not
certified by JAKIM. In this paper, we proposed a conceptual model for
benchmarking food products against certified Halal products. Our motivation is to
provide similarity measurement between certified and non-certified food products
based on their ingredients. This model comprises three main phases: ingredient
acquisition, ingredient transformation and similarity measures calculation. In the
first phase, web crawlers are employed to retrieve product information from JAKIM
online database and supermarket web pages. In the second phase, an index
structure will be constructed to allow faster ingredient retrieval which will be used
for similarity calculation. In the last phase, Euclidian distance, cosine similarity
measure and Jaccard correlation coefficient will be used to measure the
similarities between two products. Our proposed model is to complement but not
to replace the existing JAKIM procedure to verify food products by empowering
Muslim consumers with informed decision making.