(note (code cslai))

Visualization of my profile, in (not quite) RDF way

After a miserable trip back to academic world, I finally re-gained the courage to get back to job-market. For the time spent in university, I spent quite some time reading about Semantic Web and RDF. Then I thought, I should have published more in this format in future. However, that didn’t really happen, mostly because I am too lazy.

So while thinking on what to include in my resumé, the idea of including an RDF graph in it came back. While it is technically possible to represent the whole resumé and CV with a graph, but I decided against it. Throwing everything in a graph may sound good to some people, but printing it on a piece of A4 paper would probably not.

Hence, after spending some time thinking about it, I got it done yesterday. Not sure if this would impress my potential employee, but I decided to just include my personal information in it. The end product looks like this.

(eh? Flickr changed the embedding method to an iframe?)

The graph was produced by Graphviz, a utility named circo to be precise. There was a lot of frustrations involved when generating the graph. First problem was creating an RDF for that. There should be a generator somewhere for people to fill in a form, then boom it comes a nicely formatted RDF. There probably is one, but I probably overlooked. Writing one manually is a pain. Anyway, after much reading (and revising) I finally made one.

Rewriting the representation to .dot file is not a difficult job. In fact I did it in minutes.The graph didn’t look quite what I was expecting, so I spent some time experimenting. Half of the time was spent to choose the right tool to generate the graph, and the remaining was spent fine tuning it.

The graph lack a couple of contact information like email address and phone number for obvious reason. Otherwise it should describe me well. The only problem is that there seem to be no way to put my year of birth in it (the foaf:birthday property do not accept year). I am turning 28 this year, so the graph would be precisely correct after my birthday.

Even with just one level of depth, the font size is already scaled to the point where it is just barely readable. I really can’t imagine what would happen if I have more information in it. For instance, cramming my past experience in it.

The colours was added to enhance the readability of the graph. I know rainbow color scheme is evil, but it should work well in this graph. I hope this doesn’t break the convention of visualizing an RDF graph. There are also some missing information in the graph that it shouldn’t be called a standard RDF graph. I left out @prefix statements as I couldn’t find a way to put it in the graph.

Just in case anyone is interested, I would upload a copy of the .dot file somewhere in the coming days.

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