DEVELOPING AN ARCHITECTURE FOR AN INTERNSHIP VIRTUAL MARKETPLACE SYSTEM

An Internship Virtual Marketplace System (IVMS) attempts to overcome the limitations of traditional college internship management programs to enable students to gain sufficient practical skills or knowledge before they start their first job. It is a vehicle for effective allocation of internship/job opportunities on a large scale (e.g., state-wide). It is a life cycle management approach used for internships in the cyberspace, from initial internship postings, student applications, to automated and intelligent data mining and match making, to day by day internship supervising and reporting, to the end of the internship. An IVMS system will be designed to be efficient, automated, low cost, and more effective matching of internship opportunities with students’ knowledge and skills. IVMS will be dynamic. As soon as new data is entered to the system, the virtual marketplace (the data mining process) will be started. IVMS is a data warehouse with OLAP capability. As such, data can be mined along multiple dimensions. Different data cubes can be created. Given the complexity of IVMS, a prototype will need to be developed as a proof of concept before committing sufficient resources to start a large scale implementation of IVMS. The expected benefits can be substantial.