UWV: Improving the usability and effectiveness of "werk.nl"

When people become unemployed in the Netherlands they must register with the "UWV" organization. The website werk.nl is aimed at matching people looking for jobs with job descriptions delivered by companies or scraped from the Web. This website, both its front-end and the back-end server, offers a wealth of possibilities for improvements. Ideas for topics to tackle for a master student include (but are not limited too):

• The interface usability needs improvement. This also involves some server functionality. E.g. to allow people to enter what education they took the server must allow entries that are not predefined, and must thus allow users to add entries to the database. These entries require that another interface exists for UWV employees to "approve" and "match" entries. Also, the search interface must clearly distinguish results coming from the real UWV database from results obtained by scraping advertisements from the Web.
• The "flat" database with records describing aspects of jobs needs to be converted into a semantically meaningful network structure.
• Once there is a network structure a browsing interface can be developed, taking inspiration from either the AquaBrowser idea or from Faceted Browsing (like e.g. in the CHIP demo).
• The matching for search needs to be improved, by better (automated) analysis of the content of job advertisement, recognizing "attributes" rather than doing a full text search.

For this master project most of the work will be done at the UWV office which is right next to the railway station of Amsterdam Sloterdijk.