Books by scholars or stories of previous writers that are already hundreds of years old will disappear and possibly even rot naturally if there is no proper storage method. This thought inspired research students from the Faculty of Computer Science (Fasilkom) at the University of Indonesia (UI) who are members of the Pegonizer Team to look for a system or method that allows these ancient books to be stored digitally. The reason is, “The condition of books that are hundreds of years old is very, very worrying. Not to mention that the ownership is spread among many private collectors, even abroad such as Egypt, Medina and other countries,” said Yova Ruldeviyan, a Fasilkom lecturer who is also one of the supervisors of the Faculty of Computer Science (Fasilkom) team.
The concern about this condition and driven by the desire to preserve the masterpieces of the archipelago, led them to create Pegonizer, which is an application for digitizing Pegon manuscripts with book catalog features, OCR, and transliteration. The Pegon Manuscript contains a lot of knowledge, especially the deepening of Islam for adherents of Islam.
Pegonizer successfully brought the Fasilkom team to second place in the RnD category and competed among the participants in the IdenTIK competition held by the Ministry of Communication and Information on 10 November 2022, with a total of 190 entries. Later, 18 selected works (including Pegonizer) will compete to be the best work from six IdenTIK 2022 categories to obtain coaching and training to face the 2023 AICTA regional competition. The six categories are Startup Companies, Private Sector, Public Sector, Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), Research and Development (RnD), and Digital Content Technology Innovation .
Based on the Startup Ranking report, Indonesia is included in the top 10 countries with the highest number of startups in the world, namely 2,437. Seeing this potential, the Ministry of Communication and Informatics through the Directorate of Informatics Empowerment organizes the IdenTIK program as one of the strategies to develop Indonesia’s digital ecosystem.
IdenTIK is an annual competition held by the Ministry of Communication and Information in order to explore the potential of ICT products made by the nation’s children so they can compete at the world level. The IdenTIK winners are the result of the curation of competent judges in the field of ICT. The IdenTIK Jury consists of Prof. Eko K. Budiardjo (Faculty of Computer Science, University of Indonesia) as Chair of the Jury Board, Shita Laksmi (Tifa Foundation) as jury for category of Public Sector,Jurike V. Moniaga (Bina Nusantara University) as a judge for the CSR category, Prof. Yudho Giri Sucahyo (Internet Society Indonesia Jakarta Chapter) as a judge for the Research and Developmentcategory, Barry Simorangkir (Citra Optima) as a judge for the Digital Content Technology Innovation category, Leontinus Alpha Edison (Indonesian Telematics Software Association) as a judge for the Startup Companycategory, and Partono Rudiarto (INIXINDO) as a judge for the Private Sector category..
Dean of Fasilkom UI, Dr. Ir. Petrus Mursanto, M.Sc., appreciated this achievement as a real contribution by the Fasilkom academic community to the nation. “Research is part of Fasilkom UI’s mission, which is to create, develop, and apply science and technology to increase the nation’s competitiveness. Congratulations to the Fasilkom UI team, the Pegonizer application is an application that was built to solve the Pegon problem in Indonesia and it is also expected to accelerate knowledge extraction from Pegon documents,” he said.
Chairperson of the IdenTIK 2022 Jury Board and professor of Fasilkom UI, Prof. Eko K. Budiardjo conveyed, Indonesia is a country with unique characters and identities because of its diversity. This diversity gives birth to unique works resulting from the creativity of the nation’s children that need to be accommodated. “IdenTIK is here as a forum for ICT works so that their potential can be explored to appear in the eyes of the world,” said Prof. Eko
In addition to receiving coaching from the jury, the IdenTIK 2022 winner will receive coaching money with a total value of 30 million rupiah (except for the category of Public Sector,)), free credits from Xendit, the opportunity to take part in the Startup Studio Indonesia program stages and the incubation program stages for 1000 digital startups,as well as credits worth USD 10,000 to USD 25,000 from Amazon Web Services for continuing with the id hub program. Pegon-Latin transliteration on Pegonizer can be accessed through web and mobile.
The transliteration is reversible, so you can transliterate Pegon to Latin or Latin to Pegon. Typing access can be done with a standard keyboard, especially the ease of typing on the mobile version. This transliteration was developed for the first time in Indonesia by following the rules for writing in Pegon. Pegonizer access can be seen via the link pegon.cs.ui.ac.id.
