Jobs map is showcase for GIS solutions
Jinfo Blog

5th July 2009

By Tim Buckley Owen

Item

Zubed Jobs is a new free service that allows jobseekers to pinpoint opportunities in their field anywhere in the United Kingdom. Nothing particularly special about that – except that Zubed Geospatial, the company behind the venture, isn’t a recruitment firm but a provider of bespoke geographic information system (GIS) mapping solutions for individual clients. Currently in beta test mode, Zubed Jobs (http://www.zubedjobs.com) claims to reach the jobs other services can’t by applying complex semantic search routines to identify individual company websites and navigate to the vacancies posted on them. A quick look for ‘research’ jobs within three miles of my home produced a dozen candidates, at least two of which might have been worth a punt. ‘With unemployment being one of the biggest worries for the UK at the moment, we wanted to show how location intelligence really can make a difference to everyone,’ Zubed Geospatial’s chief executive Ian Haynes told Recruiter magazine (http://digbig.com/5baafn). But of course this isn’t an altruistic gesture; Zubed’s other recruitment application is talent management – providing bespoke solutions to human resources departments, including in-house skills repositories and talent resourcing as well as recruitment (http://digbig.com/5baafp). But there’s no denying that Zubed Jobs is a pretty good showcase for the company’s capabilities – and it’s likely that we’ll see semantic searching applied to geospatial data in a good many other fields before too long. Penny Crossland recently profiled a predictive monitoring tool called HealthMap, which aggregates data on disease outbreak through an almost real-time web crawling system and plots it on a satellite image of the world (http://www.vivavip.com/go/e19599). And when the UK government’s Power of Information Taskforce ran a competition challenging people to come up with smarter ways of mashing public sector data (http://digbig.com/5baafq), almost all the winning entries exploited maps.

« Blog