Web Service for Searching Halal Compliant Restaurants

Abstract

We present a web service for searching Halal compliant restaurants in order to help the increasing visitors and students from the Muslim culture to Japan find places where Halal food is served. This service geographically presents the Halal compliant restaurants on Google Maps that are franchised by the Japanese food industries with Halal certification by the Japan Halal Business Association. Such restaurants are increasing, but their population is far from enough. To solve this situation, we developed a subsystem that estimates how much Halal or Haram each food on the menu of ordinary restaurants is by calculating the cosine similarity of its ingredients, which are acquired from the recipe site Zexii Kitchen, to those on the Haram list. For example, from the food menu of Saizeriya, Pizza Margherita and Peperoncino have the similarity score 0, and they are in fact Halal. Miso Ramen and Napolitan have the similarity score 0.01 or more to be found Haram. In that way, the Muslims in Japan can find restaurants that serve probably Halal as well as certified Halal food in Japan.