Last year OpenNTF jointly hosted an ICS development contest with IBM with a difference: there had to be a team involved. The winners were Frank van der Linden and Frederic Dehedin. The application covered a variety of technologies, including Bluemix, Cloudant, and Watson. It also used the Jackson JSON Mapper Frank also submitted to OpenNTF and which has been covered on this blog before. As well as being a competition winner, the project is of particular interest because it goes beyond the technologies typical of many OpenNTF projects. So much so that a session covering the application has been accepted not only for IBM Connect but also IBM InterConnect, as Frank covers in the post he has kindly penned below.

Introduction
The Job of a Human Resources Employee is hard work, especially when it comes to handle hundreds or thousands of Job Applications. Often, the Cover Letters are coming in unstructured formats.. Keeping these data in order and prioritize interesting job applications can be difficult.

The details
HR Assistant is an XPages application running on Bluemix and is leveraging IBM Watson services which are helping:
  • Using the Tone Analyzer to get the emotions of the cover letter and job descriptions.
  • Using Personality Insights to get more insights of the applicant
  • Using Alchemy Language to get the keywords used in the text in jobs and job applications.
 
We have decided not to store the data the traditional way in a Notes database, but in IBM Cloudant datastore.
The main reason to use Cloudant was to experience a new NoSQL data store. In the end it was a good decision, because the returned data of the IBM Watson service where pretty big, and with Cloudant we where not hitting any limitations.
More details about the application, see the blog of Frederic and me
http://elstarit.nl/2016/09/19/winner-hr-assistant/
http://www.fdehedin.ch/637/winning-the-ibm-collaboration-solutions-developer-competition-2016
 
The heavy lifting
The application make use of 2 external OSGi plugins to do the heavy lifting of JSON Conversion and connection with Cloudant.
The OSGi plugins, including the update sites can be found in the Bitbucket repositories.
Cloudant connector - https://bitbucket.org/flinden68/cloudant-connector
Jackson Mapper plugin - https://bitbucket.org/flinden68/jackson-json-mapper-plugin
 
Learn more
At IBM Connect, Thursday 23rd February 8 AM in San Francisco and at IBM InterConnect, 22nd March 2 PM in LasVegas I will present a session about this application. In this session I will give more details about how we integrated the IBM Watson services and store it in IBM Cloudant and the lessons learned.

Links
The Application is available here: https://hrassistant.eu-gb.mybluemix.net/
And the source code is available on Github: https://github.com/flinden68/HR-Assistant



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