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XML keeps job seekers informed

FOREM serves some 250,000 individuals and 50,000 companies in Belgium —a clientele which, in this age of the Internet and mobile communication, uses increasingly disparate techniques to access information. Thierry Vermeeren, General Manager for IT at FOREM, explains:" Each sector represented by our customers uses its particular channels of communication. We want to capitalize on this fact to reach a maximum number of people and to bring together as many job offers and job seekers as possible."

FOREM has been on the Web for five years. At the end of 1999 it launched a new service called HotJob, an information portal dedicated to recruitment and training. Today, it enables job seekers to consult employment opportunities corresponding to their career profiles via their WAP-enabled mobile telephones. In order to expand access to its services, FOREM called upon the expertise of ACSE, the Professional Services Division of Software AG Belgium specializing in SGML. On the basis of Tamino, Software AG ’s XML database, a new and innovative solution was developed.

Finding a job with WAP

The new opportunities of WAP-enabled telephones led to the launch of QuickJob, a joint project of FOREM, ACSE and other sub-contractors: Job seekers can simply call up information about vacancies via their mobile telephones.

How does this work? Prospective employees access the HotJob Web site at www.hotjob.be and select the option QuickJob on the menu. They define their personal profiles, which include education, desired function, industry sector, type of contract, languages spoken, and preferred location. Finally, they specify how they would like to receive matching job offers: by e-mail or WAP. In the future, a third option will be available: SMS messaging will dramatically increase FOREM’s reach to potential users.

Before embarking upon this WAP project, FOREM’s Information Department and ACSE decided to create a document publishing system that automatically manages large quantities of information, thus ensuring dynamic publishing in line with users’ requirements. This is SCOOP —an online magazine dedicated to the world of employment and training. SCOOP enables an automated structuring procedure to be applied to editorial content in HTML format, which in turn is used for publishing employment opportunities in XML. Thierry Vermeeren:" The SCOOP prototype was used first of all as a data model. Today it includes articles, a calendar and an address database."

Tamino provides the basis

"Providing WAP access to SCOOP was fairly straightforward, as it only required the use of WML style sheets. In the future it will include employment opportunities as well. All information relevant to these opportunities will be stored in a hierarchical model based on SGML technology, rather than a relational system," explains Thierry Vermeeren.

FOREM chose Tamino, Software AG ’s XML database, for the implementation of its document publishing system. It is currently used to store the editorial content of the SCOOP magazine. This enables information to be hierarchically structured, thus preserving the sequence of the original document and facilitating subsequent inquiries. Philippe Vijghen, ACSE Software Engineer and Project Leader for the FOREM project explains:"

Thanks to Tamino, the structure of an article can easily be identified and also directly queried on the region or sector to which it refers. Search criteria such as keywords and creation date can also be used. This is also possible using a relational database, but in that case, the effort required is much greater because relational tables would have to be defined and populated for each criterion." With Tamino queries can be directly addressed to a document."

Dealing with new and old data

But the implementation is not all that easy, as old, unstructured data and new, structured data must work together, at least temporarily. Thierry Vermeeren says:" Our database contains one million people and about fifty thousand job offers a year, for which there are a large number of legal requirements. It would not be feasible to unplug the old and plug in the new. The pain of transition consists of feeding the new XML system while carrying on with the old until all the information it contains becomes obsolete."

Putting such a huge amount of information into an XML structure provides a range of advantages. Apart from being able to automate the publishing process according to a candidate ’s profile, it enables the establishment of a dynamic link between a document and its presentation on the Web. Thierry Vermeeren:" The HotJob site currently comprises 2,000 pages. Changing the look and feel of 2,000 pages is a monumental task.

In the future, however, the ability to automatically generate HTML pages means that we will have much more flexibility concerning presentation styles as data will be totally separated from its presentation. And that constitutes a phenomenal leap forward in terms of handling." Philippe Vijghen adds: "Using the same pivotal format, XML enables the storage method to be defined, as well as the best presentation and data exchange formats. With a relational system, you will never be able to exchange data with a partner, and you will never be able to define how to display relational data in HTML. The relational model requires a particular protocol for each aspect, whereas with XML you keep the same model from start to finish."

Given the short life span of job offers and CVs, putting in place a new publishing line is perfectly feasible in this instance. Given the transitory nature of job offers and CVs, this new kind of publishing offers a great advantage.

One content, many languages

From the moment a candidate ’s profile and a job offer are correctly described at the source, it becomes possible to establish synonyms in other languages for key information, using the professional nomenclature established by the ILO’s (International Labor Organization) multilingual thesaurus (four languages). The function is thus automatically qualified in three other languages, with no additional intervention. Thierry Vermeeren: "The development of our French-language Belgian portal into a more European one will be a natural step. Our long-term intention is to construct a cross-border site in four languages."