The Semantic Web blog has explored job opportunities that are emerging for those in the RDF/SPRQL/ontology/etc. space (in a few articles, such as this and this). And we’ve also explored how some job search engines themselves are or are becoming more semantic to service industries of every stripe (see here and here).

Now there’s also a venue emerging for anyone who’s just wondering about what he might earn if he ever can get a job as a civil engineer in Decatur, or maybe who is just generally interested in studying the pay scale for different occupations. Semantic technology vendor True Knowledge posted on its blog this week that it’s been combing the dark web (aka the deep web) to directly answer questions related to jobs data.

We say emerging as some experimentation with jobs-related queries shows it’s got a ways to go. True Knowledge does note that it’s pulled in “some” information about occupations. They don’t necessarily match to what you might think would be high on the job information query quotient, like that civil engineer/Decatur example. Another for-instance: Right now you actually can find out how many skin care specialists are practicing in Texas – but not how many doctors. You can glean whether an avionics technician is well paid compared to other maintenance, installation and repair worker jobs, but you won’t find a similar answer for grammar-school teachers. That dark web – the web pages that traditional search engines don’t index and so can’t see – apparently won’t give up its secrets easily.

Here’s how True Knowledge reasoned to the answer to the avionics technician question mentioned above:

Of course, the True Knowledge model is that users themselves can add new facts or people, businesses or other objects for the site to store in structured form, which may answer questions or contribute, in conjunction with other facts, to True Knowledge’s ability to come up with a specific answer. In practice, though, fewer users typically add to its knowledge base than True Knowledge itself draws from sources including Wikipedia, Freebase, and now data sets on the Dark Web.

Lots of Jobs, Though

It would be interesting – especially in these jobless times – to see True Knowledge ramp up on the jobs data front. That could be very useful for researchers and those in the news media, for example. Meantime, it is itself ramping up on the jobs front: At the end of July it hired Simon Weaver, formerly of Bing, as VP of Engineering.

And for those with semantic/search expertise – who live or would like to move to the other side of the Big Pond – its own home page proclaims that it’s hiring. Positions listed include openings for:

• Product Manager of Trueknowledge.com

• Technical Architect

• Information Extraction Developer (Information Retrieval/NLP/Big Data Sets)

• Knowledge Engineer

• Knowledge Assistant

• Graduate Knowledge Processing Developer

Good luck to the applicants!

• Don’t forget to propose your startup for our Semantic Web Impact Awards. The deadline is Sept. 15.

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