Gathering Alumni Information from a Web Social Network

Abstract

An undergraduate program must prepare its students for the major needs of the labor market. One of the main ways to identify what are the demands to be met is creating a manner to manage information of its alumni. This consists of gathering data from program's alumni and finding out what are their main areas of employment on the labor market or which are their main fields of research in the academy. Usually, this data is obtained through available forms on the Web or forwarded by mail or email, however, these methods, in addition to being laborious, do not present good feedback from the alumni. Thus, this work proposes a novel method to help teaching staffs of undergraduate programs to gather information on the desired population of alumni, semi-automatically, on the Web. Overall, by using a few alumni pages as an initial set of sample pages, the proposed method was capable of gathering information concerning a number of alumni twice as bigger than adopted conventional methods.