Due to high costs employers in this economy often publish their job postings only
on a small number of portals, which prevents the offers from reaching all qualified applicants.
Employers often receive a large number of applications for an open position due
to the strained situation of the labour market. The costs of manually preselecting
potential candidates have risen, and employers are searching for means to automate
Thus, employers would like to decrease transaction costs for publishing job
postings and for preselecting appropriate candidates. Job seekers would profit from
increased transparency in the labour market in their search for a matching
position. In this paper, we argue that both goals could simultaneously be reached by
using Semantic Web Technologies as part of the recruitment process.
The basic idea of the Semantic Web [BeHe01] is to extend the Web, in addition to
classic HTML pages, with machine-understandable data. The objective is to use
the Web like a globally distributed knowledge store which can be leveraged by
applications to perform tasks automatically. The base technologies for realizing this
1. Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs) as a global identification mechanism for
resources and terms used to describe them
2. The Resource Description Framework (RDF) as a basic data model, together with
its XML-based serialisation syntax, for publishing data on the Web
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3. The Web Ontology Language (OWL), extending RDF with terms and concepts
for expressive knowledge representation [W3C04c].
The development of the Semantic Web is a joined effort of scientific (MIT, Stan-
ford, ILRT etc.) and business institutions (HP, IBM, Nokia etc.) led by the World
Wide Web Consortium (W3C). There are substantial research and development
investments in semantic technologies by the mayor players of the IT market
...