Looking for halal food when traveling to other countries, especially in which the majority of the population aren’t Muslims is not an easy task. Asep Bagja Priandana, developer of travel expense app Travees is trying to solve this by developing Halal Data, a crowdsourced search engine aimed at providing information on halal food and products worldwide.
Halal Data is a crowdsourcing website which enables anyone to contribute in many ways, be it as the information provider or fund raiser. For those who want to provide information about halal products or restaurants all over the world, they may register at Halal Data website. At this early stage, the website has two categories of places: hotels and restaurants. So far, it has complete data of the locations in four countries, which are Taiwan, Thailand, Singapore, and Hong Kong.
Halal Data’s website looks a lot like Google’s, showing only a logo, a search bar, and a sliver of a navigation bar. The search results are quite accurate too, although, some results show only the restaurants’ names and addresses, while others show links to other websites as sources. In a lot of cases, information fields for phone or fax numbers, email addresses and websites remain empty. It would also be a lot more helpful to include map reference for a more complete set of information. It would also be good to have opening hours listed against each venue. Halal Data currently claims to have around two thousand entries.
Even though crowdsourcing offers fast data collection, the data validity should also be considered, particularly since Halal Data provides information on halal products to Muslims. In this regard, wrong information would be troublesome. For those who want to validate the data, Asep encourages them to send an email to halaldata[at]asep.com. He is also inviting other web developers to contribute, especially for those who master Ruby.
Before Halal Data was launched though, Japan-based Indonesian student Agung Pambudi had already established HalalMinds, a mobile app to search for halal products in Japan. We think it would be a great idea if the two entrepreneurial developers were to collaborate and combine the data to expand their database even further.
Users may also contribute by sharing about information provided by Halal Data on their social media, or directly to their friends and families. For Muslims outside of Indonesia, this website may turn out to be the perfect place to find out about halal products information.
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