Abstract:

Engineering is a very dynamic and versatile field where the students need technological innovation, analytical brain and fresh ideas, and cannot rely solely on conventional methods in grasping existing theories and concepts. The fundamental elements utilized in most engineering courses are numbers of diagrams, concepts together with formulas and equations. There are great volumes of formulas from diverse fields available in the Internet, yet searching for engineering-focused formulas and equations in digital form using online tools is still limited. In fact, the available online formulas are uncategorized and unfocused which lead to the problem of information overload. Hence, since engineering is a discipline with its own formulas and equations, we address this issue by designing and presenting Hydraulic Formula in Civil Engineering (HydraFOC), a civil engineering-focused digital repository specifically for civil engineering formulas and equations. HydraFOC will enable civil engineering students to search for formulas and equations of fundamental of fluid mechanics and hydraulics of civil engineering courses by using text. Here, it can act as a quick reference for students for the important formulas that are extremely useful for the chapter concerned under hydraulics subject of civil engineering. Besides, it can also be utilized by other engineering disciplines as well as the non-engineering students especially while handling water resources management project. An initial study was conducted based on the last three semesters results for Diploma of Civil Engineering, EC110 UiTM Pahang Branch campus shows the passing rate of the water resources course still not reaching excellent achievement. The analysis shows the relevancy and led us to propose HydraFOC as a new search engine to enhance the student skills in calculating the relevant topics under fluid mechanics and hydraulic analysis which leads to better results. During system development, we use PHP for the back-end and server-side scripting and HTML5, CSS3, jQuery, and AJAX for the front-end. HydraFOC is using MariaDB as Database Management System (DBMS) to keep and update all records. HydraFOC uses Application Programming Interface (API) written in Python programming language to integrate data with UiTM i-Staff Portal for the administrator login module. The data provided by the API is in JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) data format. Further, We utilize text classification technique for HydraFOC to automatically sort the search formulas from a predefined set. HydraFOC can read the keywords and can use the anchor text in the links to assign relevance to those formulas. The uncovered of HydraFOC digital repository will shed light to the engineering field upon the convergence of technology and civil engineering knowledge that will simplify and benefit the teaching and learning environment.

Keywords:

Digital repository, formula, civil engineering, fluid mechanics, hydraulics.