e-Cemetery Portal: A Tool for Digitizing the Cemetery Culture in Malaysia

The cemetery is known as a sacred void space where the living and the dead symbolically become one by performing the funeral memorial rites. In Malaysia, the cemetery culture is widely practiced by all major ethnicity. However, past studies highlighted that the burial ground allocation in Malaysia has reduced due to poor cemetery management and rapid infrastructure development to promote housing and tourism sector. Therefore, this research proposes the e-Cemetery portal to increase the efficiency of the existing Cemetery Management systems and to adhere to the new demands from the tech-savvy millennial. This e-Cemetery portal digitized the cemetery culture by using the Rapid Application Design (RAD) approach to develop the system. The portal was further tested and validated to determine the efficacy of the design. A total of 10 respondents participated in the validation process of the e-Cemetery portal design. It is found that the design successfully digitized the roles of the e-Cemetery target users and enhanced the cemetery management protocol. However, the research has some limitation as it does not address the various security issues. Some implications of the findings are discussed in this paper.