Dear all,
fwiw, the Brazilian Government (though its NSF or SRC equivalent agency)
already maintains a national database of researchers with public
acccess: http://lattes.cnpq.br/english/index.htm.
It is not exactly a wiki, but anyone can register and include his/her
CV. It is not free-form, but follows a pretty extensive data model (not
without problems...).
Since it is used to evaluate grant proposals, all researchers which get
government funding keep it up to date.
It does export its data in XML format (using its own vocabulary).
We are in the process of converting parts of it into RDF (basically,
publications), which will be used to publish our department's
publications (or, more generally, intelectual output). For this we
extended the Biblio ontology.
But there would be interest in converting the rest as well, which
includes also different positions held, distinctions, etc...
So, regarding your proposal, I don't really see the advantage of using a
plain WIki engine to do what you propose; at the very least, Semantic
Media Wiki or Kiwi should be used.
But, in reality, I think something more similar to Freebase would be
more adequate to allow the different uses.
Notice also that there are softwares used by HR departments to do skills
management which seem to do essentially what you propose; I'm not aware
of open source (or free) versions, let alone ones that provide RDF data.
In these remarks, I'm not addressing the more "community aspects" of
your proposal, which could still be supported by any of the alternatives
discussed above...
Cheers
D.
---
Prof. Daniel Schwabe
Dep. de Informática, PUC-Rio
R. M. de S. Vicente, 225, Rio de Janeiro, RJ 22453-900
Tel. +55 21 3114 1500 x. 4356
Toby Inkster wrote:
I think this is a great idea for a project, but I don't have time to
do it myself...
1. Set up a wiki (pref MediaWiki) for people to publish their
CVs/Resumés. This might need slightly different access restrictions
than normal MediaWiki installations to prevent people from negatively
editing others' CVs.
2. The site would provide a bunch of MediaWiki "templates" which would
expose the CV data as XHTML+RDFa using the FOAF and DOAC vocabs
primarily.
3. The site would provide a conformance checking tool for CV authors,
using RDFS and OWL reasoning, and perhaps in-built knowledge of FOAF
and DOAC, to look at individual CVs and check them for contradictions.
(e.g. range/domain conflicts.)
4. The site would provide a "dictionary" of skills, each with a URI,
for more standardised markup of a person's skillset.
5. A bot would monitor the "recent changes" RSS feed (is this valid
RSS 1.0 - i.e. RDF? If not, it could maybe be fixed.) finding CVs
which had recently been changed. Each of these would be parsed as RDFa
and entered into a big, communal triple store (using the URL of the CV
page as a graph name for easy maintenance).
6. A SPARQL endpoint would be exposed for the big triple store.
7. People could write various human-friendly forms as a wrapper for
the SPARQL endpoint. The cviki community would vote on the best of
these, and the winner would be placed on the Wiki front page.
