Job Architect. Helping companies write job ads
First appeared in westartup.eu
Nowadays, IT companies do not rely on intermediates when looking for new employees. They use the Jobs sections of their websites, advertise on Stepstone, Monster or LinkedIn. They use the power of the word-of-mouth. In the ongoing battle for the new talent, the attractiveness of the job ad for the company is as important as that of the resume for an applicant. However, many IT job ads are written either by the middle management or by HR, that is, people who are likely to miss the most attractive features of the new position by sheer lack of domain knowledge.
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Create a public poll service with eID authentication for Belgians
First appeared in westartup.eu
The eID is not only a small piece of plastic that replaces your old cardboard national ID card, but a means to electronically sign legally binding documents.
The law that enforces the equality betwen the handwrittend and electronic signature passed in 2001. Put aside legal considerations,a poll that collects 20.000+ votes where each voter is legally authentified as a citizen and can be traced by his eID card number has much more impact than a poll of 20.000+ anonymous internet users.
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Write a useable FP7 proposal collaboration tool
Appeared originally in westartup.eu.
There are already some FP7-related services, two clicks from the google home page, but they are mostly about consulting or badly written tools that none uses anyway.
Companies behind these tools do not provide trial versions nor demo versions, only one has a (really bad) screencast. Technical features are missing from the descriptions. Moreover, they do not respond to inquiries to provide more information on their tools.
A proposal, especially an FP7 proposal has a fairly evolved internal structure. Its TOC does not almost change at the first two levels, and there are a few rules everyone follows, e.g.
- Consortium members are numbered
- Each consortium member has a company profile section
- Work is split into work packages
- One member is assigned as a work package lead
- Work packages are split into tasks
- One or more members are assigned to each task
- Tasks shall lead to deliverables
- There are milestones in the project
- There is a Gantt chart
- and so on…
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Use version control software for lawmaking processes
Originally published in westartup.eu.
As usual, the US is ahead of the rest of the world with the law.gov initiative that formalizes and makes available in a useful way all existing information pertaining to the country's legal system. It is important to change the lawmaking processes so that they create data in ways that are immediately useful by services like law.gov.
The pilot project may combine ⅓ of software development and configuration activities with ⅔ of training, support and follow up.
The money is made in long-term projects maintenance and support projects that will be a joy to run once the shift is made.
Target customers: Ministry of Justice, DG Justice, standards bodies, big companies with evolved internal standards and ever failing formal verification and validation procedures run over tens if not hunderds of Microsoft Word documents stores on SharePoint servers.
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Вот так вот фламандофоны сражаются за свой язык
Казалось, в просвящённой Европе подобные методы революционной борьбы давно вышли из моды, ан нет.
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A old but still useable phpbb2drupal conversion script
This one appears high in Google SERPs on phpbb2drupal.
A case for XTM 3.0
This was written for TMRA'08 together with Rani Pinchuk and Xuân Baldauf.
Improvements to XTM 2.0 are suggested in this paper. First, a set of criteria is defined for evaluating those improvements. It is followed by the suggestions themselves: align element names with the names used in TMDM, reduce the number of elements by introducing mixed content and using attributes whenever it is possible. Finally, some relevant irregularities are discussed.
See the paper in the attachment.
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Learning foci for Question Answering over Topic Maps
The paper on Question Answering I have cowritten with Rani Pinchuk and Tiphaine Dalmas for ACL-IJCNLP'09.
Abstract
This paper introduces the concepts of asking point and expected answer type as variations of the question focus. They are of particular importance for QA over semi-structured data, as represented by Topic Maps, OWL or custom XML formats. We describe an approach to the identification of the question focus from questions asked to a Question Answering system over Topic Maps by extracting the asking point and falling back to the expected answer type when necessary. We use known machine learning techniques for expected answer type extraction and we implement a novel approach to the asking point extraction. We also provide a mathematical model to predict the performance of the system.
See the paper in the attachment.
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Occasional XSLT for Experienced Software Developers
FIrst published in 2004 in DevX
Although using XSLT to process XML is increasingly common, most developers still use it only occasionally—and often treat it as just another procedural language. But that's not the best way to use XSLT. Learn how to simplify and improve your XSLT processing using event-driven and declarative techniques.
XML appears in some form in most modern applications—and often needs to be transformed from one form into another: merged, split, massaged, or simply reformatted into HTML. In most cases, it's far more robust and efficient to use XSLT to perform such transformations than to use common programming languages such as Java, VB.NET, or C#. But because XSLT is an add-on rather than a core language, most developers use XSLT only occasionally, and have neither time nor resources to dive into the peculiarities of XSLT development or to explore the paradigms of functional and flow-driven programming that efficient use of XSLT requires.
Such occasional use carries the danger of abusing programming techniques suitable for mainstream languages such as Java, C and Python, but that can lead to disastrous results when applied to XSLT.
However, you can avoid the problems of occasional use by studying a few applications of different well-known programming problems to an XSLT programming task through this set of simple, thoroughly explained exercises.