Paper records for multi-generation lineage
Pedigree and breeding records spanning generations of dogs, held in formats that made verification slow and continuity fragile.
Case StudyProfessional Services
Arabian Saluki Center: Digitising a Living Heritage Institution
The Arabian Saluki Center in Abu Dhabi preserves one of the UAE’s oldest traditions — the breeding and training of the Arabian Saluki. We built its bilingual digital presence, its iOS and Android apps, and the records platform behind them: breeding lineage, registrations, microchip identification, and certificates, moving decades of paper heritage into a system built to protect it.
At a Glance
- Client
- Arabian Saluki Center, Abu Dhabi
- Sector
- Heritage & specialised services
- Engagement
- Website, mobile apps + records platform
- Languages
- Arabic & English (full RTL)
- Focus
- Registrations, pedigree, certificates
Background
The Context That Made This Worth Building
Established in 2001 with the support of the Emirates Falconers’ Club, the Arabian Saluki Center is the first institution of its kind in the Middle East — dedicated to preserving the desert hunting tradition of the Saluki through breeding, training, healthcare, and official registration. Its records are not just data; they are lineage documents for a living piece of Emirati heritage.
An institution like this carries two obligations at once: presenting its mission to the world with appropriate dignity, and running precise operational records — births, pedigrees, microchips, passports, ownership — that people rely on for decades. Both were running on systems that hadn’t kept pace with the institution’s standing.
The Challenge
The Pain Points That Started It
Heritage institutions face a digital paradox: the subject is centuries old, but the audience — breeders, owners, researchers, and visitors — expects modern access in two languages.
Registration by visit and phone call
Registrations, microchip records, and certificate requests handled manually — respectful of tradition, but slow for owners across the Emirates and abroad.
A story told in one language at a time
The Center’s mission deserves equally dignified telling in Arabic and English — true right-to-left design, not a translated afterthought.
Discovery
Understanding Before Building
Discovery meant understanding the domain before the data: how Saluki lineage is recorded, what makes a pedigree authoritative, which documents owners actually need (registrations, parentage certificates, passports for travel), and where the manual process created delays. We mapped the paper trail end to end with the people who maintain it.
The second thread was tone. A heritage institution’s website cannot look like a startup’s. We studied how comparable cultural institutions present themselves and set a design direction of restraint: photography-led, typographically calm, bilingual as a first-class experience — the digital equivalent of the Center’s own standing.
The Solution
What We Designed and Built
Three connected builds: the public face that tells the story, the records platform that does the institutional work, and mobile apps that put both in owners’ pockets.
Bilingual heritage website
Arabic and English with full RTL design, presenting the Center’s mission, services, and the Saluki tradition itself — dignified, fast, and search-visible for the people looking for it.
Breeding & registration platform
Structured records for dogs, litters, and lineage; microchip identification; registration workflows; and certificate generation replacing manual paperwork.
Owner service workflows
Requests for registrations, certificates, and services handled digitally with status tracking — fewer trips, faster answers, unbroken records.
Owner mobile apps (iOS & Android)
Bilingual Flutter apps for both stores: owners carry their dogs’ records, submit registration and certificate requests, and follow their status from anywhere — the same workflows as the web, in the pocket of every breeder.
Scope Delivered
Everything That Shipped
- Bilingual (AR/EN) website with full right-to-left design
- Dog, litter & lineage record system
- Microchip identification registry
- Registration & certificate request workflows
- iOS & Android owner apps (Flutter, bilingual)
- Generated parentage certificates & documents
- Services and visit information for the public
- Admin panel for Center staff
- Digitisation of existing records
Implementation
How the Build Ran
- 1
Domain mappingWeeks 1–2
Record structures, certificate formats, and registration workflows documented with Center staff — the paper process understood before being replaced.
- 2
Records platform buildWeeks 3–6
Lineage data model, registration workflows, and certificate generation built and reviewed weekly against real record samples.
- 3
Public websiteWeeks 5–8
Bilingual site designed and built in parallel — content workshops with the Center shaped the story in both languages.
- 4
Migration & trainingWeeks 8–10
Existing records digitised and verified, staff trained, and the manual process retired gradually rather than abruptly.
- 5
Mobile appsWeeks 9–12
Bilingual Flutter apps built on the platform’s existing APIs and released to the App Store and Google Play — owners took the registry with them from launch week.
Stack
- Next.js
- React
- Flutter
- Node.js
- PostgreSQL
- Payload CMS
Results & ROI
What It Delivered
~12 wksFull engagement, records to launch
2Languages, both first-class (AR/EN)
100%Registration workflows digitised
MinutesCertificate turnaround, from days
- Lineage and registration records preserved in a structured system instead of vulnerable paper archives
- Certificate and registration requests handled digitally with status visibility for owners
- Owners across the Emirates and abroad carry records and requests in bilingual iOS & Android apps
- The Center’s story told with equal dignity in Arabic and English, to a global audience
- Staff time shifted from paperwork to the breeding and training work that is the actual mission
The quiet achievement of this project is permanence: records that document a living heritage are now stored, linked, and verifiable in a system designed to outlast any single filing cabinet or custodian. The public site brings the tradition to a global audience in both languages; the platform behind it makes the institution’s daily work faster and its history safer.
Takeaways
What This Project Teaches
Digitise the domain, not just the documents
Scanning paper is not digitisation. Modelling lineage properly — dogs, litters, parentage — is what made the records verifiable and the certificates trustworthy.
Heritage demands design restraint
The strongest brand statement for a cultural institution is calm: typography, photography, and pace that treat the subject with the seriousness it has earned.
Bilingual means equal, not translated
Arabic was designed as a first-class experience with true RTL layouts — the difference between serving the tradition’s own community and merely acknowledging it.
Before You Ask
What Readers Usually Want to Know
We hold decades of paper records. How does digitisation actually work?
In two stages. First we model the domain properly — what a record is, how lineage links, which documents must be generated — because scanning paper into a folder is not digitisation. Then existing records are entered and verified against the originals, usually running alongside the paper process until the team trusts the system. The modelling is the part that determines whether the records stay verifiable in twenty years.
Can you build systems that work properly in Arabic, not just translated?
Yes, and we treat it as a design requirement rather than a language setting. That means true right-to-left layouts, typography chosen for Arabic, mixed-direction content (numbers, names, dates) handled correctly, and testing with real Arabic content rather than placeholder text. For an institution whose audience is Arabic-speaking, anything less reads as an afterthought.
Our organisation is not technical. Who runs the system afterwards?
Your team, on an admin panel built for non-technical staff, with training as part of the project and support afterwards. We design assuming the people using it daily are subject-matter experts, not software users — if a task needs a manual to complete, that is a design failure on our side.
The Services Behind This Build
Need the Same Capabilities?
Want a Result Like This?
Tell us your pain points — we’ll walk you through how we’d scope it, what it would cost, and what a realistic outcome looks like. Honestly, both ways.