The role of a human resources employee can be hard work when it comes to filtering hundreds or thousands of job applications. Often, the cover letters are submitted in unstructured formats, making data organization and identification of interesting job applications difficult. In this session, we will share a look behind the scenes of the award-winning HR Assistant application, which uses a combination of IBM Bluemix, Watson and a Cloudant database to improve the recruitment process. See how we integrate these different technologies and display the content graphically using XPages, along with how the development progressed and the challenges we faced.

1. How Watson, Bluemix, Cloudant, and
XPages Can Work Together In A Real
World Application
Frank van der Linden, elstar IT
Full stack Java Developer
DEV-1129
IBM Connect 2017 Conference

2. Me
• Freelance Full stack Java developer
• Owner of elstar IT
• Curious of new technology
• IBM Champion 2013, 2014 and 2017
• Run (mountain) marathons

3. How do we proceed
• HR Assistant
• Running it on IBM BlueMix
• Store it in Cloudant
• Analyse it with IBM Watson
• Show it with Charts
• Lessons learned

4. HR Assistant

5. Demo time

7. Frédéric Dehédin
• At the time of the project: Senior Application developer
at Belsoft Collaboration AG
• @fdehedin
• http://www.fdehedin.ch/

8. Facts
• Winner of the ICS Developer Competition 2016
• Runs on the XSP runtime on IBM BlueMix
• Store all the data in Cloudant
• Analyse jobs and job applications with IBM Watson
• Backend is pure Java, no Java Notes objects

9. Add ons
• Cloudant connector OSGi plugin
• Take out the security issue
• Storing in and retrieving from Cloudant. JSON <—> POJO
• Can be accessed from Java backend.
• Do the heavy lifting. Don't reinvent the wheel.

10. Add ons
• Jackson Mapper OSGi plugin
• Take out the security issue
• Used with the IBM Watson services
• Conversion of JSON to POJO
• Makes @Annotations available in Java back end

11. Roadmap

12. Running it on IBM BlueMix

13. Overview
• BlueMix is IBM PaaS, with various services
• We picked a few services

14. Credentials

15. Deploy to IBM BlueMix
• Fill the BlueMix Manifest file under
Application Configuration
• Will result in a yaml file

16. Deploy to IBM BlueMix
• Set location of deployment
• Add shared-plugin folder
• Add the OSGi plugins

17. Deploy to IBM BlueMix
• Deploy Application

18. Store it in Cloudant

19. What is Cloudant
• It is the cloud version of CouchDb
• It is document based
• CouchDb is created by Damien Katz
• Cloudant is bought by IBM
• Is like MongoDb or NSF a NoSQL datastore

20. What is Cloudant
• Data stored as JSON
• View and Search ‘formula’ defined in javascript
• Replication
• Tasks
• Build in API
• No annoying limitations

21. Cloudant database

22. Design document
• Special type of document
• Holds javascript for View and FT Search definition.

23. • It is JSON everywhere.
• _rev and _id are reserved parameters.
• doc{}, is the actual data from application
Document

24. Attachment @ Cloudant
• Stored as base64 encoded String
• Can be as standalone
• Or as part of Document (we choose this way)
• Store id as attachmentId, so it can be retrieved when needed

25. Attachment @ Cloudant
• AttachmentDAO

26. Attachment @ Cloudant
• AttachmentController
• Convert upload to Attachment
object

27. Attachment @ Cloudant
• ControllerBase
• All controllers can use these methods

28. Attachment @ Cloudant
• Servlet is called in application for download
• base64 data for the image tag

29. Analyse it with IBM Watson

30. Watson API explorer
• Very useful to test input and see what is returned

31. Services we used
• Tone analyser, to get the tone of the text
• Personality Insight, to determine the personality of the job applicant
• AlchemyLanguage, to get the keywords from the Job and Job
application

32. tone analyser schema

33. Tone analyser
• The same structure to call the Watson services

34. Tone analyser
• ToneAnalyzerRequest contain the text to analyse
• ToneAnalyzerInjector gets text from model class

35. Tone analyser
• Post the data to IBM Watson service (1)
• Convert the response back to Java class (2)
1
2

36. Tone analyser
• ToneAnalyzerResponse holds the results
• Use @annotations from Jackson to map
JSON to properties
• Result is the source of the charts

37. Show it with charts

38. ChartJS
• Open source HTML5 javascript based
• Responsive
• DataSets = Array of Objects

39. ChartJS
• Factory to produce the chart data, accepts objects
• Factory set default Chart Type, like Radar or Bar

40. ChartJS

41. ChartJS
• Custom control to display data

42. ChartJS
• Custom control to display data.

43. Lessons learned

44. Lessons learned
• No Single Sign On service on all datacenters
• Manifest yaml file and GIT are not an happy couple
• API’s are not consistent across Watson services
• Cloudant is a very reliable, flexible and fast NoSQL datastore
• IBM Watson services are really powerful.

45. Lessons learned
• There is no RichText on the web, it is HTML
• Handling attachments on Cloudant was a challenge. Took some time get a
robust solution.
• BTW the way, we won the competition ;-)

46. Questions

47. Resources
• HR Assistant on BlueMix
• https://hrassistant.eu-gb.mybluemix.net/
• HR Assistant code on GitHub
• https://github.com/flinden68/HR-Assistant
• IBM Watson services
• https://www.ibm.com/watson/developercloud/services-catalog.html
• IBM Cloudant documentation
• https://docs.cloudant.com/
• HR Assistant Demo
• https://youtu.be/yM5Foxn9Fvg

48. Resources
• OSGi Cloudant connector
• https://bitbucket.org/flinden68/cloudant-connector
• OSGi Jackson JSON Wrapper
• https://bitbucket.org/flinden68/jackson-json-mapper-plugin
• ChartJS
• http://www.chartjs.org/
• Watson API Explorer
• https://watson-api-explorer.mybluemix.net/

49. Reach out to me
• @flinden68
• http://www.elstarit.nl
• flinden68@elstarit.nl
• https://nl.linkedin.com/in/flinden68