Politicians might tell you that, “the ongoing evaluation of global joblessness data can be represented by a negative slope on the current employment hysteresis”.

Unemployment is on the rise, in other words.

So, it’s rather timely that a powerful “meta job search” engine is being developed by Austrian and UK computer scientists. Tabbasum Naz of the Vienna University of Technology, worked with colleague Jürgen Dorn and Alexandra Poulovassilis of the London Knowledge Lab at the University of London, point out that the main problem job seekers face in searching for employment opportunities on the web is that there are many diverse recruitment sites. The sites all have different interfaces, different terminology, and different approaches to database structure, so defining a single tool to access them all simultaneously is a significant obstacle to overcome.

The researchers have developed a way around this obstacle that hints at the possibilities of the semantic web, sometimes dubbed web 3.0, in which information is not only readable and understandable to a person, but to a computer too. They have devised a hybrid approach to integrate and search the many disparate recruitment and related sites, a meta search that works by mapping and matching the various criteria using a computer glossary, an ontology.

The ontology is like a global interpreter that makes irrelevant the different source recruitment search engine interfaces. The user can then query all sites at once from a single entry point without having to understand the different user interfaces, terminology, and site structure. This meta search engine resolves the conflicts of meaning that arise due to the different implementation of job searching across all the engines, the semantic conflicts.

“Traditional search engines are based on keyword or phrase search, without taking into account the semantics of the word or phrase, and hence may not provide the desired results to the user,” the researchers explain. “Our experiments in the job domain show that the combined use of element-level, structure-level and ontology-based techniques increases the correctness of matching during the automatic integration of the source search engine interfaces.”

The team explains that experiments on 21 job search engines showed that their record collector is 90.5% correct in record section identification, 95.3% correct in job URL identification and 63.2% correct in job titles identification. So, there is room for improvement and for the extension to non-English language sites. But, this work suggests that the semantic web might well assist those caught on the negative slope of the joblessness hysteresis.

Online job search portal, recruitment sites, careers, job hunting, online hiring:

http://www.canjobs.com/index.cfm
http://www.techjobscafe.com
http://www.jobmonkeyjobs.com/GetJobs.rs
http://www.6figurejobs.com/ExecSearchJobs.cfm?
http://www.jobshejobs.com/
http://www.brightspyre.com/opening/index.php
http://www.net-temps.com/findjobs.html
http://jobsearch.monster.com/Search.aspx
http://www.thejobspider.com/job/job-search.asp
http://www.workopolis.com/
http://www.jobs.net/
http://www.itclassifieds.com/jobsearch/jobsearch.asp
http://www.aftercollege.com/
http://www.mymatrixjobs.com/
http://jobs.boston.com/careers/jobsearch
http://chronicle.com/search/jobs/
http://www.sciencetext.com/tech-jobs
http://www.nationjob.com/
http://www.flipdog.com/jobs/vienna/
http://www.jobserve.com/
http://www.totaljobs.com/
http://jobs.imdiversity.com/jobseekerx/SearchJobsForm.asp
http://www.jobvertise.com/search
http://www.learn4good.com/jobs/

Tabbasum Naz, Jürgen Dorn, & Alexandra Poulovassilis (2010). Configurable meta-search in the job domain Int. J. Web Engineering and Technology, 6 (1), 33-57