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There are tremendous works in biotechnology especially in area of DNA molecules. The computer society is attempting to develop smaller computing devices through computational models which are based on the operations performed on the DNA molecules. A Watson-Crick automaton, a theoretical model for DNA based computation, has two reading heads, and works on double-stranded sequences of the input related by a complementarity relation similar with the Watson-Crick complementarity of DNA nucleotides. Over the time, several variants of Watson-Crick automata have been introduced and investigated. However, they cannot be used as suitable DNA based computational models for molecular stochastic processes and fuzzy processes that are related to important practical problems such as molecular parsing, gene disease detection, and food authentication. In this paper we define new variants of Watson-Crick automata, called weighted Watson-Crick automata, developing theoretical models for molecular stochastic and fuzzy proce...

In this paper, we present a derivative of Midimew connected Mesh Network (MMN) by reassigning the free links for higher level interconnection for the optimum performance of the MMN; called Derived MMN (DMMN). We present the architecture of DMMN, addressing of nodes, routing of message and evaluate the static network performance. It is shown that the proposed DMMN possesses several attractive features, including constant degree, small diameter, low cost, small average distance, moderate bisection width, and same fault tolerant performance than that of other conventional and hierarchical interconnection networks. With the same node degree, arc connectivity, bisection width, and wiring complexity, the average distance of the DMMN is lower than that of other networks.

Inference engine plays an important role in knowledge-based system, where it is used to perform reasoning when queries are entered. There is a need to incorporate a semantic reasoner in the engine, in order for it to perform reasoning. With the growth of Semantic Web and increasing number of ontology implemented recently, several semantic reasoner have been design and implemented to cater the need of the current ontology-based systems. Since there are various numbers of available semantic reasoners in the market for general knowledge-based system or ontology-based system, developers are required to choose an appropriate reasoner that met the system requirements when developing the engine. This paper will review six different ontology reasoners, which have been widely applied previously in ontology based system. By studying the strength and weaknesses of the techniques and algorithms implemented, developer able to select an appropriate reasoner that will work efficiently according to system requirements.

Midimew connected Mesh Network (MMN) is a Minimal DIstance MEsh with Wrap-around links (midimew) network. In this paper, we present the architecture of MMN and evaluate the total wire length of MMN, TESH, mesh, and torus networks. It is shown that the proposed MMN possesses simple structure and moderate wire length. The total wire length of MMN is slightly higher than that of mesh network and lower than that of 2-D torus network. Overall performance suggests that, MMN is an optimal network among these networks.

Despite the recent economic slowdown, Malaysia still aspires to move from an industrial to an information economy. Malaysia’s ultimate goal is that, by the year 2020 the country will have become a fully developed nation and have created the Multimedia Super Corridor (MSC) which world class companies can use as a regional hub. One of seven flagship applications created to jumpstart the MSC is that for Smart Schools. With the advent of the information society a new system of education with information technology and multimedia as the enabling forces is needed. This paper describes the Collaborative Courseware Production Model (CCPM) adopted by the Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia and a commercial firm, Digital Technologies (DTech), in bidding for the Smart School project. Describes the problems faced by the two organizations and how they were overcome. Concludes that this successful collaboration between a business organization and a university can be emulated by other business and academic organizations by leveraging on partnering intelligence or the respective strengths of the organizations.

Indexing is one of the important technique used to make searching and retrieval process more accurate and faster. In this paper, the indexing features of triple stores are investigated to see the pattern of semantic indexing that will improve the current information retrieval indexing. To do the evaluation, we choose the best triple stores, Allegro Graph. AllegroGraph require more than one triple indices pattern to be matched with the query. Therefore we do the evaluation of triple indices to determine which triple indices pattern gives for fast retrieval. During experiment, we use RDF data. Then we matched the triple indices pattern with the SPARQL query to retrieve the relevant data. As the result, it would take longer if the system contains unneeded triple indices which will waste CPU times and disk space. Removing unneeded triple indices pattern will provide for fast retrieval.

This paper attempts to highlight the conceptual model of MEL (Multimedia in Education for Literacy) (1), a multimedia based tutoring system based on language learning and pedagogical approaches suitable for the learning and teaching of literacy and reading. The key modules as well as the design and development approaches of this multimedia based tutoring system have been designed to motivate literacy through a unique program. This program is designed to provide a dynamic and flexible teaching and learning module in the vernacular language, suitable for individualized and self‐paced learning. It is hoped that this tutoring module for motivating literacy will be beneficial to beginning, emergent and reluctant readers alike and serve as a framework for future development of a multimedia tutoring system for motivating literacy.

Integration between the members in complex network of the supply chain group has been an issue for flexible supply chain management. Restructuring of pre-planned activities across the group to react to known deviation may not be possible. The authors decided to introduce an Information Management Architecture (IMA) as the intermediary process which can provide semi-automated assistance for tighter integration. The IMA sits between the RFID infrastructure and the existing supply chain systems and continuously monitors the current activities and wraps services from existing systems to increase the flexibility for immediate process restructuring. A comparison was made between two types of deviations that occurred at the early and final stages of a customization process with and without IMA support. The results showed that the IMA was more stable compared to other supports and significantly performed better in completing joint tasks.

Machine Translation has been defined as the process that utilizes computer software to translate text from one natural language to another. This definition involves accounting for the grammatical structure of each language and using rules, examples and grammars to transfer the grammatical structure of the source language (SL) into the target language (TL). This paper presents English to Arabic approach for translating well-structured English sentences into well-structured Arabic sentences, using a Grammar based and example-translation techniques to handle the problems of ordering and agreement. The proposed methodology is flexible and scalable, the main advantages are: first, a hybrid-based approach combined advantages of rule-based (RBMT) with advantages example-based (EBMT), and second, it can be applied on some other languages with minor modifications. The OAK Parser is used to analyze the input English text to get the part of speech (POS) for each word in the text as a pre-translation process using the C# language, validation rules have been applied in both the database design and the programming code in order to ensure the integrity of data. A major design goal of this system is that it will be used as a stand-alone tool, and can be very well integrated with a general machine translation system for English sentences.

With the rise of hyperlinked networks and the broad spectrum of information that is accessible over the Web, a lot of data sources become available. XML standard receives large acceptance, the comparison of the Web to a “database” is closer to reality than ever before. One of the long-standing and challenging problems for many applications, is schema matching. While there are many schema-matching algorithms proposed in the literature to tackle this problem, most of them are not tackling the indirect mappings, just the few ones do, but still there is a need to cover the special cases of XML schemas. In this paper, we propose a new composite approach that detects direct and indirect mappings for XML schemas with higher accuracy, by proposing algorithms for XML schema matching, after combining them, to detect most kinds of mappings. Our approach to automating XML Schema matching combines terminological mappings with the data value characteristics and the expected data values for the element-level matching, which combined with the XML structural mappings by applying a dedicated XML Match taxonomy. We also, develop an ontology that fits to the structure of XML schemas, in order to solve semantic conflicts.

We are in the information intensive environment in which various forms of digital contents have been growing exponentially. In this era of digital data, knowledge representation has been considered as a crucial component of any information retrieval system. It is also considered as a major problem especially in representing the content of unstructured text in an effective way. Although the mission remains impossible to achieve 100% accuracy, many researchers are indulging themselves in documenting these data in many different techniques so that it can be communicated effectively and easily. Indexing is an important element that determines the success of retrieval. Since we are dealing with multiple documents, preprocessing of data is needed before the data gets indexed. Thus, this paper presents an approach on the preprocessing technique. The semantic data which have been represented in skolem clauses will be preprocessed with the help of automatic lexicon generator output and WordNet. This preprocessing plays an important role in getting rid of redundant data before it gets indexed into the semantic matrix. Besides redundancy, it also helps in dealing with common problem that exists in indexing multiple documents in which similar sentences with more or less the same meaning but have been constructed by using different sets of words. As a conclusion, the integration of WordNet and lexicon leads to better result in terms of building effective knowledge representation.

There have been very few studies on the use of conflation algorithms for indexing and retrieval of Malay documents. The two main classes of conflation algorithms are string-similarity algorithms and stemming algorithms. Stemming is used in information retrieval systems to reduce variant word forms to common roots in order to improve retrieval effectiveness. As in other languages, there is a need for an effective stemming algorithm for the indexing and retrieval of Malay documents. Again there are few research on n-gram string-similarity measures done on Malay. We have experimented on the application of stemming and string similarity matching on retrieving of verses from the Al-Quran in order to evaluated their effectiveness. Before retrieval effectiveness can be carried out an experimental data set need to be developed which comprises of a collection of documents, a set of queries, and their relevant judgements. In this paper we will describe the development of the experimental data set and the application of stemming and similarity matching algorithms in retrieving the verses from the Al-Quran. Inherent characteristics of n-grams and several variations of experiments performed on the queries and documents are discussed. The variations are: both non-stemmed queries and documents; stemmed queries and nonstemmed documents; and both stemmed queries and documents. Further experiment are then carried out by removing the most frequently occurring n-gram. The dice-coefficient is used as threshold and weight in ranking the retrieved documents. Beside using dice coefficients to rank documents, inverse document frequency weights are also used. Interpolation technique and standard recall-precision functions are used to evaluate the retrieval effectiveness.

The representation of document content is very important factors in retrieval process. The failure to create a good knowledge representation will definitely lead to failure in terms of its retrieval no matter how good the retrieval engine is. Therefore, this research focused on creating a reliable knowledge representation for our retrieval engine. We are using skolem to capture the information conveyed by multiple text documents and used skolem as an index language. This research also focuses on utilizing the skolem index as its knowledge representation in its question answering system. The system is capable of retrieving the answer as well as states the exact document in which the answer is derived from.

The rapid growth of digital data and users’ information needs have made the demands for automatic indexing to become more important than before. Indexing based on keyword has proven to be unsuccessful to cater for the current needs. Thus, this paper presents a new approach in creating semantic skolem indexing for multiple documents that automatically index all the documents into single knowledge representation. The skolem indexing matrix will then be incorporated in question answering system to retrieve the answer for users query.

The evaluation on the success of E-Government applications through visual relationship measurement model using Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) was conducted on 157 public user. Thus, the objective of this paper is to discuss the implementation of e-government in Malaysia, based on the findings of public user assessment conducted on Malaysia's electronic government applications such as E-services, e-procurement, Generic Office Environment (GOE), Human Resources Management Information System (HRMIS), Project Monitoring System (PMS), Electronic Labor Exchange (ELX), e-tanah, e-pbt (local authority), e-kehakiman and e-syariah. The study adopted a crosssectional survey research approach and a three-round Delphi for ascertaining the definition of information system project success. Findings of the study showed that there was evidence from public user's perspective that the egovernment applications were generally successful. Data were analyzed using exploratory factor analysis via SPSS and confirmatory factor analysis via visual relationship shown through AMOS, to validate the hypothesis model.

Thesaurus has become another valuable structure in any Information Retrieval system. It is a list of terms and concepts that provide a controlled vocabulary of words to use in document indexing, clustering, searching and retrieval. This paper present the results of expanding user's query using Malay thesaurus in the process of searching Malay documents from Malay Hadith retrieval system. The results obtained shows that the retrieval effectiveness improves by four percent when thesaurus is employed in the process of retrieving Malay translated Hadith documents, compared to when single term queries are employed.

Holistic Islamic Banking System (HiCORE) is a virtual multi-tiered system adopting the Services Orientation Architecture (SOA) and parameter driven modules to create new Islamic banking products based on Syariah laws. Islamic banking or Islamic finance reflects banking or financial business that is not contradictory to the principles of Islamic law. This is statutorily mentioned in both the Islamic Banking Act 1983 and the Banking and Financial Institutions Act 1989. In Malaysia, for the creation of Islamic banking products, flexibility is given to practitioners, regulators and Syariah advisors to create and introduce unlimited Islamic banking products to support Islamic banking business. If in the conventional manner, banks may take at least six months for new Islamic products to be created, HiCORE can ensure the possibility of creating an Islamic product at less than a quarter of the time span taken or less (taking into consideration that all policies and processes needed to carry out the transactions are in place). HiCORE went through the normal evaluation process: unit testing, System Integration Test (SIT) and User Acceptance Test (UAT). This paper highlights the latter but unique to the testing of HiCORE, as the UAT is conducted by a Panel of Experts, represented by 15 members from the Islamic Banking industry in the country. Generally, results of the UAT conducted, indicated positive results by the panel of experts. However, there were some specific features and functionalities that needed improvement. In fact one of the features of the system on new product creation which allows users to see the Source of the Dalil (Al-Quran verses or Sunnah), Hukum dan the Syarat during new product creation makes HiCORE novel.

Over the past decades, computer revolution has opened up many possibilities for new field of investigation. With greater accessibility to information and lowering cost of powerful computers, this has spawned new efforts towards understanding complex tasks. Lexicon in particular has long been recognized as interesting and challenging because of its complexness. It is the knowledge of individual words in the language that has been perceived as central component for all types of natural language processing system. In this paper we present an algorithm to create an automatic lexicon generator in order to generate lexicon from an input document by making use of Apple Pie Parser. The lexicon generated managed to reduce significant amount of time and manpower drastically. Psycholinguists as well as computational linguists can benefit from this automatic lexicon construction.

Even though researches in content-based image retrieval are one of the most intensive research areas of information retrieval, they almost certainly focused on retrieving natural images or photographs. Artificially-produced images are stylized form of natural, real-life objects. Research for these images have received less attention, thus this paper attempts to intensify work in this area by implementing quantitative and qualitative performance evaluation of artificially-produced images. Fifty selected images are used as sample queries and they are retrieved based on fusion of geometric shape descriptors. Similarities of these images are measured using Euclidean distance and performances of the retrievals are evaluated using both quantitative and qualitative tests. Quantitative test using recall-precision rate and hit-miss ratio showed that geometric shape descriptors are effective in retrieving the images. However, qualitative test results demonstrate agreement between the system and the interviewed people in the assignment of similarity ranks is at average level.

Computer science is in the more challenging era due to the digital growth and demand that we are facing today. A typical IR system will not go far enough as it uses keyword in order to retrieve the desired information. On the other hand, natural language question answering which is based on logic retrieval have proven to perform better than other methods. The most important component of question answering system is the lexicon. Researchers have identified this as the backbone of any NLP system. In this paper we present our approach on how an automatic lexicon generator has been integrated with question answering system which uses logical inference model. This paper also shows on how the automatic lexicon generator has helped in creating knowledge representation to be used by logic based question answering system. Besides that, the lexicon generated managed to reduce significant amount of time and manpower. It has also helped to make the question answering system to be more robust.

Performance on a question answering system is reflected by the number of correct answers that is produce from a list of alternate choices. However, many answers would appear in documents and passages laden with terms from the query. It becomes more difficult and eventually impossible to make a precise answer to a query. The aim of this study is to determine the keyword of the precise answer to a specific query and illustrate the answer in visual expression. In this paper we propose a method to translate text into visual expression, closest to the correct answer. To achieve a significant illustration capability it is necessary to develop methods of dealing with knowledge base. Firstly, we must consider the real world and the visual expression of key information that can be extracted from the words. The proposed system will analyse and match them using visual semantic simplification description based on logical representation.

A new semantic based video scene detection technology is proposed to improve the effectiveness of video retrieval. In this study, we proposed a framework for constructing semantic audiovisual features for detecting human action. Two major components, including multimodality features and matching process, are discussed and their corresponding algorithms are presented. A pilot evaluation was conducted to compare the effectiveness of multimodality that supports semantic audiovisualbased detection. Some experimental examples are given to demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of proposed algorithms.

The Holistic Islamic Banking System (HiCORE), a banking system suitable for virtual banking environment, created based on universityindustry collaboration initiative between Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (UKM) and Fuziq Software Sdn Bhd. HiCORE was modeled on a multitiered Simple - Services Oriented Architecture (S-SOA), using the parameterbased semantic approach. HiCORE's existence is timely as the financial world is looking for a new approach to creating banking and financial products that are interest free or based on the Islamic Syariah principles and jurisprudence. An interest free banking system has currently caught the interest of bankers and financiers all over the world. HiCORE's Parameter-based module houses the Customer-information file (CIF), Deposit and Financing components. The Parameter based module represents the third tier of the multi-tiered Simple SOA approach. This paper highlights the multi-tiered parameter- driven approach to the creation of new Islamiic products based on the `dalil' (Quran), `syarat' (rules) and `rukun' (procedures) as required by the syariah principles and jurisprudence reflected by the semantic ontology embedded in the parameter module of the system.

Support vector machines (SVMs) and related kernel methods have become widely known tools for text mining tasks such as classification and regression. The Arabic part of speech (POS) based support vectors machine is designed and implemented. The NeuroSolutions software is used to adopt and learn the proposed tagger. The radial basis functions (RBFs) is used as a linear function approximator. The experiments has give an evinced that the SVMs tagger is accurate of (99.99%), has low processing time, and use a little a mount of data at training phase.

The Holistic Islamic Banking System: (HiCORE) is a university and industry collaboration initiative between Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (UKM) and Fuziq Software Sdn Bhd., sponsored through the Techno Fund Grant of the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation, Malaysia. HiCORE, is modeled on a Multi-tiered Services Oriented Architecture (SOA), using the parameter-based Multimedia semantic approach. The research conducted is timely as the financial world is looking for a new approach to banking and financial system. The interest free banking system caught the interest of bankers and financiers all over the world. Today, it is in line with the Islamic banking, financial and related commercial activities, consistent with the syariah principles propagated since the time of the Prophet (p.b.u.h.). This paper highlights the conceptual framework of HiCORE, its arhitecture and the modules designed based on the Cognitive-Intuitive Life Cycle Development model (CI-HiCORE). The paper shall also highlight examples of the DFD or ERD modeling of the Software Requirement Specifications (SRS) and the Software Design Specifications (SDS) of HiCORE.

Machine Translation has been defined as the process that utilizes computer software to translate text from one natural language to another[2].This definition involves accounting for the grammatical structure of each language and using rules and grammars to transfer the grammatical structure of the source language (SL) into the target language (TL). Agreement and Word-ordering play an important role with this structure, as MT should handle agreement between the subject and verb where the number gender, person and features of the subject are important factors in the derivation of the verb as well as the features of the verb itself. Other agreements are required between the adjective and the noun where Arabic adjectives depend on the number, gender and person as well as the definiteness and indefiniteness of the noun. Some other agreements also exist between the numbers and the countable nouns. This paper examines the agreement and word-order rules in tackling Arabic MT systems. Special attention is given to Tarjim by Sakhr Software Company which pioneered a new generation of Arabic Natural Language Processing (NLP) technologies. The approach adopted is flexible and scalable, and the main advantages are: first, it is a rule-based approach, and second, it can be applied on other languages with minor modifications. A major design goal of this system is that it can be used as a stand-alone tool and can be very well integrated with a general machine translation system for English sentence.

Mathematical morphological operations are commonly used as a tool in image processing for extracting image components that are useful in the representation and description of region shape. In this paper, six basic morphological operations are investigated to remove noise and enhance the appearance of binary images. Dilation, erosion, opening, closing, fill and majority operations are tested on twenty-five images and subjectively evaluated based on perceived quality of the enhanced images. Results of the experiments showed that noise can be effectively removed from binary images using combinations of erode-dilate operations. Also, the binary images are significantly enhanced using combinations of majority-close operations.

The idea of the computer system capable of simulating understanding with respect to reading a story or passage and answering questions pertaining to it, has received increased attention within the NLP community as a means to develop and evaluate robust question answering methods. This research is concerned with the problem of generating an automated answer in the context of sophisticated knowledge representation, reasoning, and logical inferential processing. The research focused on Wh types of question to a restricted domain. External knowledge sources i.e. world knowledge (WK) and hypernyms matching procedure (HMP) were introduced. World knowledge led to the refinement of the ability of the system to extract the relevant answers. It provided a solution to the outstanding problem related to the ambiguity enclosed by anaphora and synonym words. Meanwhile, hypernyms refer to a more general or broad keywords, which was able to widen the results of the search. Thus, hypernyms matching procedure was to give a more coherent meaning of words, and eased in the process of extracting the answer based on a given question. This research found that the combined external knowledge sources on word dependencies improved the accuracy of the question answering system with respect to human performance measures.

This paper introduces a logical-linguistic model of document retrieval systems and describes an implementation of a system called SILOL which is based on this model. SILOL uses a shallow semantic translation of natural language texts into a first order predicate representation in performing a document indexing and retrieval process. Some preliminary experiments have been carried out to test the retrieval effectiveness of this system. The results obtained show improvements in the level of retrieval effectiveness, which demonstrate that the approach of using a semantic theory of natural language and logic in document retrieval systems is a valid one.

Phrases has a long history in information retrieval, particularly in commercial systems. Implicit semantic relationship between words in a form of BaseNP have shown significant improvement in term of precision in many IR studies. Our research focuses on linguistic phrases which is language dependent. Our results show that using BaseNP can improve performance although above 62% of words formation in Malay Language based on derivational affixes and suffixes., {"references":["Atlam, E.S., Fuketa, M., Morita, K., & Aoe, J., Documents Similarity\nMeasurement Using Field Association Terms, Information Processing\nand Management Journal, 39, 2003, pp. 809-824.","Baeza-Yates, R & Ribeiro-Neto, B., Modern Information Retrieval,\nAddison-Wesley, New York, 1999.","Croft, W. B., User-specified Domain Knowledge for Document\nRetrieval, Proceedings Of The ACM Conference On Research And\nDevelopment In Information Retrieval, 1986, pp. 201-206.","Fatimah A., A Malay Language Document Retrieval System: An\nExperimental Approach And Analysis, Ph.D Thesis, Universiti\nKebangsaan Malaysia, 1995","Fagan, J. L, Experiments in Automatic Phrase Indexing for Document\nRetrieval: A Comparison of Syntactic and Non-Syntactic Methods, Ph.D.\nThesis, Department of Computing Science, Cornell University, Ithica,\nNew York, 1987.","Lewis, D.D. and Jones, K.S., Natural Language Processing for\nInformation Retrieval, Communication of the ACM, Vol 39 No. 1 , 1996,\npp. 92-100.","Sanderson, M. ,Word Sense Disambiguation and Information Retrieval,\nProceedings of the Seventeenth Annual International ACM-SIGIR\nConference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval,\n1994, pp. 142-151, Springer-Verlag.","Salton, G., A Blueprint For Automatic Indexing, ACM SIGIR Forum 16,\n2 (Fall 1981), 1981, pp. 22-38.","Salton, C.. and Lesk., M.E. Computer Evaluation Of Indexing And Text\nProcessing, Communication of the ACM, Vol 15 No. 1 , 1986, pp. 6-36.\n[10] Salton, G., Introduction to Modern Information Retrieval, McGraw-Hill,\nNew York, 1983.\n[11] Salton, G., Another Look At Automatic Text Retrieval Systems,\nCommunications of the ACM, Vol 29 No. 7, 1986, pp. 648-656.\n[12] Van Rijsbergen, C.J. Information Retrieval, 2nd edition,\nButterworth.,1979.\n[13] Yun, B. H., H. S. Lim and H.C. Rim, Analysis of Korean Compound\nNouns using Statistical Information, Proc. of the 22nd Korea\nInformation Science Society Spring Conference, 1994, pp 925-928.\n[14] Zainab Abu Bakar, Evaluation Of Retrieval Effectiveness Of Conflation\nMethods On Malay Documents, Ph.D Thesis, Universiti Kebangsaan\nMalaysia, 1999.\n[15] Zainab Abu Bakar & Nurazzah Abdul Rahman, Evaluating The\nEffectiveness Of Thesaurus And Stemming Methods In Retrieving\nMalay Translated Al-Quran Documents, Proceeding Of 6th\nInternational Conference On Asian Digital Libraries, 2003, pp. 653-\n662. Springer-verlag."]}

Songket is a traditional handwoven cloth of the Malays and its beauty lies on the design of the songket motifs intricately woven on the cloth. Even though color is a feature of the motif, shape is more important in determining the type of the motifs. This paper describes and tests the efficiency of retrieving songket motifs images using different combination of five geometric shape descriptors. Even though there are many existing approaches of shape-based image retrievals, the goal of this paper is to take advantage of the faster calculations of the geometric shape descriptors to retrieve the images. Fifty selected songket motifs are used as sample queries in this paper. Similarities of these images are measured using Euclidean distance and performance of the retrieval effectiveness is evaluated using recall and precision rate. Results of the experiment showed that geometric shape descriptors are effective in retrieving the songket motifs.

Virtual walkthrough application allows users to navigate and immerse in the generated 3D environment with computer graphics assist. The 3D environment requires a large amount of geometry to make it look realistic. When the number of geometry increase, the performance of the application will become slower. Consequently, it creates a conflict between the needs of realistic and real time. In this paper, we discuss the implementation of visual culling techniques such as view frustum culling, back face culling and occlusion culling in the virtual walkthrough application. We render only what we can see during the application runtime and cull away unnecessary geometry. This will accelerate the performance of the system. Without the culling techniques implemented in virtual reality application such as virtual walkthrough, the system has to allocate a large space of memory to store the geometry data. We have tested these techniques to the Ancient Malacca data. With the visual culling techniques implemented, the virtual walkthrough system can work in real time mode without scarifying realism factor.

Exploring virtual world will give a memorable experience to the users. Generally, they are expecting smooth navigation with high quality image drawn into their eyes. Nevertheless, when the virtual world is growing simultaneously with the number of objects, the navigation will be detained. Yet, the frame rates can become unacceptable. In this paper, we present and examine range detection approach for view frustum culling to effectively speed-up the interactive virtual heritage project namely Ancient Malacca Virtual Walkthrough. Normal six plane view frustum culling approach use the plane equation to test whether objects is within the visible region. However, range detection approach is different with normal six plane view frustum. It is based on camera referential point and tests the objects if they are in the viewing range. The results show that this approach is able to increase the rendering performance of the virtual walkthrough without sacrificing the visual quality.

This paper discussed the effectiveness of several popular gradient-based edge detection techniques when applied on binary images of songket motifs. Five edge detector algorithms that is Roberts, Sobel, Prewitt, Laplacian of Gaussian and Canny are applied to twenty-five Malaysian traditional songket motifs. These scanned motif images are initially preprocessed to remove noise using several morphological operations. Other than noise removal, binarization of color images are also done to produce binary images. To determine the performance of the edge detectors, the results are evaluated by five human subjects based on several pre-conceived criteria.

The emergence of global information society has increased the importance of translating articles from Malay to English, and vice-versa, to assist in the dissemination of information into and from South East Asia, mainly Malaysia, Indonesia and Brunei where Malay language is widely used. This has created the need to have computer-aided translation tools to facilitate the translation process. In this article, the authors describe the design implementation, and evaluation of a Malay-English and English-Malay scientific terms retrieving software. The system was designed and implemented using object-oriented techniques with user friendly interfaces and some basic facilities. For example, the database maintainer can add, change or delete terms from the database, and reindex files. The general user can retrieved terms through the Internet using any browser with JAVA plug-in. The indexing and retrieving strategies are based on stemming and n-gram methods. The system was developed using JAVA language and thus Web enabled and can be accessed at http://www.ftsm.ukm.my/istilah/.

The levels-of-processing theory proposes that there are many ways to process and code information. The level of processing adopted will determine the quality of the representation used to store the information in the computer memory or storage. The levels-of-processing applied in information retrieval can be classified as follows: string processing, morphological processing, syntactic processing and semantic processing. These level-of-processing are imbedded into various models of information retrieval. Conventional information retrieval models, such as Boolean and vector space models rely on an extensive use of keywords, as independent strings, and their frequencies in storing and retrieving information. Thus string processing and morphological processing are mainly adopted in these models. It is believed that such an approach has reached its upper limit of retrieval effectiveness, and therefore, new approaches should be investigated for the development of future systems that will be more effective. With current advances in programming languages and techniques, natural language processing and understanding, and generally in the fields of artificial intelligence and cognitive science, there are now attempts made to include knowledge representation and linguistic processing into information retrieval systems. We also focus our research on the application of certain techniques on specific languages. Besides English, we focus the application of certain techniques especially on Malay. In this paper we will highlight some of the research done in the area of information retrieval at the various levels of processing, and also expound the current research we are doing and the future direction that we would like to undertake.

This paper concerns an application of latent semantic indexing on Malay and English cross language information retrieval system. The retrieval effectiveness was tested on the actual Quranic collection using latent semantic indexing model. The results show that average precision on cross language is higher than monolingual retrieval.

To support the realisation of semantic web – as well as digital library, the semantic information content of web documents need to be specified in order to make the tangled information more accessible to search engines and other applications. A number of efforts to support the semantic representation of web documents have been proposed. One such effort is the semantic document modelling of which existing web documents are classified and organised to form a semantic document model representing the contents of respective web documents. In this paper we propose a tool meant to assist in constructing semantic document models using natural language analysis technique and a domain specific ontology. Together with users involvement and participation the tool gradually construct the semantic document model which is represented as XML.

The reading survey carried out by the National Library of Malaysia (1996), reported that the average Malaysian reads only half a page in a year. In order to enhance reading among Malaysians, reading habit should be instilled while they are young and this can be done through various pre-reading activities like drawing, writing and storytelling. However, storytelling by parents rarely takes place in this modern hectic life of today. Most of the parents spend much of their time on their job than reading to their children. When they do, children are read to using books on foreign folktales, which may not be adaptive to local culture. Realizing these problems, there is a need for research into developing a suitable model to motivate reading habit especially among children at an early age. The model should incorporate the use of Malaysian folktales using multimedia technology. The paper attempts to highlight the conceptual model of multimedia courseware on Malaysian folktales which is based on the learning and pedagogical approaches deemed suitable for children in motivating them to read. The design of this courseware is then based on a "2T SIGN" principle, which uses six criteria: Thematic, Technological, Simulative, Interactive, Gaming and Navigative.

A Midimew-connected Mesh Network (MMN) is a minimal distance mesh with wrap-around links network of multiple basic modules (BMs), in which the BMs are 2D-mesh networks that are hierarchically interconnected for higher-level networks. In this paper, we present the architecture of the MMN, addressing of node, routing of message, and evaluate the static network performance of MMN, TESH, mesh and torus networks. In addition, we propose the network-on-chip (NoC) implementation of MMN. With innovative combination of diagonal and hierarchical structure, the MMN possesses several attractive features, including constant degree, small diameter, low cost, small average distance, moderate bisection width and high fault tolerant performance than that of other conventional and hierarchical interconnection networks. The simple architecture of MMN is also highly suitable for NoC implementation. To implement all the links of level-3 MMN, only four layers are needed which is feasible with current and future VLSI technologies.

The emergence of the information era has increased the importance of translating articles from Malay to English, and vice-versa, to assist in the dissemination of information into and from South East Asia, mainly Malaysia, Indonesia and Brunei where the Malay language is widely used. This has created the need to have good computer aided translation systems to facilitate the translation of terms. The authors describe the design and implementation of a Malay-English and English-Malay scientific terms retrieval software named Istilah Sains UKM. The system was designed and implemented using object oriented techniques with user friendly interfaces and some basic facilities. For example, the database maintainer can add, change or delete terms from the database, reindex files and the general user can retrieve terms through the Internet. The indexing and retrieval strategies are based on stemming and n-gram methods. The system was developed using JAVA language and thus is Web enabled and can be accessed at http://www.ftsm.ukm.my/istilah/. (3 pages)

The previous study of static network performance of a Vertical Midimew connected Mesh Network (VMMN) was shown to be good. However, its dynamic communication performance has not been evaluated yet, we have proposed a deadlock free dimension order routing algorithm using 4 virtual channels. In this paper, The TOPAZ simulator is used to evaluate the dynamic communication performance of a VMMN with virtual cut-through flow control under uniform traffic pattern. We found that the VMMN dynamic communication performance is better than that of the hierarchical TESH network and its counter rival MMN.