Wikidata:WikiProject University degrees/Reports/Fiji

Getting Started

Before starting our research we wanted to make sure that we had understood the task at hand clearly. Therefore we began reading through the reports that had been created by students of the Semantic Modeling course in the summer semester 2018. Reading through these reports gave us a much better idea of what was expected from us. Furthermore we started playing around with the queries the others had made. This way we could get some first experiences with SPARQL. Next we took a deeper look into the different properties of university and degree that can be found here. Reading through this page helped us to get a good fist overview about existing properties and items.

Gathering of information about University Degrees in Fiji

To get started on our project we used Anabin to get a first overview about the universities and study programs in Fiji. From our first search we were able to find out that there are 3 different universities in Fiji offering a total of 29 different study programs. This was great for getting a first general overview about what is offered in Fiji, but as we found out later on the information provided by Anabin was far from complete.

In order to get a more holistic view about the different universities and the study programs they offer we started looking for the official websites of the universities. In the process we realized that there was a fourth university which was not part of the Anabin database. The official websites of the four universities in Fiji are the following:

Checking what is already on Wikidata

Universities on Fiji

After researching which universities exist on Fiji, we wanted to look up the state of modelling in wikidata. We created a SPARQL2 query (inspired by last semesters report on Iceland [1]) to display all universities that are listed in WIKIDATA already. We were able to find and list three institutions from Fiji.

The following query uses these:

Items: university (Q3918)   , Fiji (Q712)

Properties: instance of (P31)   , country (P17)  
```
SELECT DISTINCT ?university ?universityLabel WHERE {
  SERVICE wikibase:label { bd:serviceParam wikibase:language "en". }
  ?university wdt:P31 wd:Q3918. #instance of university
  ?university wdt:P17 wd:Q712. #country Fiji
}
ORDER BY ?universityLabel
```

Try it!

The result of the query was the following:

Query Result: Universities in Fiji

Unfortunately those three institutions were neither the same ones we found on Anabin nor did they really match the data we gathered from our own research.

Academic Majors Granted by Universities on Fiji

Next we wanted to see which academic majors are granted by the different fijian universities or rather which of these are already in wikidata.

The following query uses these:

Items: Fiji (Q712)   , university (Q3918)

Properties: country (P17)   , instance of (P31)   , grants (P5460)   , academic major (P812)  
```
SELECT ?universityLabel ?degreeLabel ?majorLabel 
WHERE {
    SERVICE wikibase:label { bd:serviceParam wikibase:language "en". }
    ?university wdt:P17 wd:Q712 . #country Fiji
    ?university wdt:P31 wd:Q3918 . #instance of university
    ?university p:P5460 ?statement . #grants
    ?statement ps:P5460 ?degree . #grants
    OPTIONAL { ?statement pq:P812 ?major .} #academic major
}
ORDER BY ?degreeLabel ?universityLabel
```

Try it!

Alumni

We thought it would be nice to see, who graduated from a fijian university so we created another SPARQL2 query loosely based on a query from our projects query section [2] .

The following query uses these:

Items: university (Q3918)   , Fiji (Q712)   , Germany (Q183)

Properties: instance of (P31)   , country (P17)   , educated at (P69)   , academic degree (P512)  
```
SELECT DISTINCT ?alumniLabel ?universityLabel ?degreeLabel WHERE {
  SERVICE wikibase:label { bd:serviceParam wikibase:language "en". }
  ?alumni p:P69 ?statement . #educated at
  ?statement ps:P69 ?university . #educated at
  ?university wdt:P31 wd:Q3918 . #instance of university
  ?university wdt:P17 wd:Q712 . #country fiji
  #?university wdt:P17 wd:Q183 . #country germany
  ?statement pq:P512 ?degree . #academic degree
}
```

Try it!

Unfortunately there is only one person found in wikidata who has graduated from a fijian university with a degree (see the query result). We also tested the query by looking at universities in Germany, to make sure that our query works.

Adding general information about Fiji's Universities

It was not only our task to add the different degrees to the universities of Fiji but also to provide some general information like student count and inception date.

Finding an up-to-date student count for the different universities turned out to be quite hard. We had to go trough several annual reports in form of pdf files that were published by the universities themselves in order to get some student count numbers. For the University of Fiji the most recent numbers were from 2013 while the Fiji National University had more current numbers published. The University of the South Pacific actually had a student count from 2017 published on their Wikipedia page. The Pacific Regional Seminary did not have any numbers available anywhere. In order to get more up-to-date data we sent Emails to the Pacific Regional Seminary and University of Fiji, asking for their current student count and explaining what the numbers will be used for. Unfortunately we have not received an answer so far. When we do we will make sure to complement the information of Wikidata.

When we started to work on the Fiji National University we found that there was an inception date already given. According to Wikidata the university was founded in 2010. The reference for that date was “imported by wikipedia". When looking at the connected Article we found that there is not only one inception date given but two. The second was 1885. Unfortatnuatlly there was no reference given for these numbers. When we researched our selves for an inception date we found an annual report where an inception date of 2009 was given. The process for the other three universities where more or less similar.

In Wikidata the "Fiji School of Medicine" of Medicine was given as a University located in Fiji. When reading the corresponding Wikipedia Article we found out that this School of Medicine was originally a university on is own but was merged in 2010 together with other faculties to the Fiji National University. Because there was no convincing reference for this date we relied on the earlier mentioned annual report. We also changed the name to the current Name College of Medicine, Nursing & Health Sciences and established a correct connection between the college / faculty and the Fiji National University. A similar approach we used for the other four colleges that are belonging to the Fiji National University.

Classifying Degrees

Once we had gathered all the information about the various universities in Fiji we used their official websites to link the the degrees to them. This process turned out the be the most time consuming activity in our project work. In order to get a first overview of potential modeling approaches we analyzed the HTW entry (Q875138). Based on our observations there we started adding degrees to our universities by using the grants property. The grants property allows us to link items that are instances of academic degree to our university item.

Bacherlor/Master of Arts/Science

To get a large part of the degrees covered right away we started off by linking all degrees that could be classified as Bachelor of Science, Bachelor of Arts, Master of Science and Master of Arts. As these types of degrees were quite straightforward to model, not much additional work was required. Simply adding items for missing fields of study was enough to be able to get all these degrees covered.

Other Bacherlor & Master Degrees

Many study programs that we found on the websites of the universities were neither science nor art degrees but had their own classification. Examples of these types of degrees are Master of Medicine or Bachelor of Education. Once we had added these degrees to our universities we linked all matching study programs to them.

Uncategorized Bachelor & Master Degrees

Next we started looking into the various other Master and Bachelor degrees that did not fit into any of the existing degree classifications. In order to add them to our universities anyway we linked the items master's degree Q183816 and bachelor's degree Q163727 to our university items using the grants property once again. Having our new items linked to the university items we could add the various academic degrees by using identifiers. This way we were able to get all remaining bachelor and master degrees covered.

Remaining Degrees

Finally we had to model any remaining types of degrees like doctorates and diplomas. As the corresponding items already existed on Wikidata this process was fairly straightforward.

Challenges

Classifying Degrees

Even if the process how we classified the different degrees seems easy and clear it was for us far from simple to decide or to find out the degree you can earn from a study program and then to put it into Wikidata. Also it needed a lot of new items for the different study programs. Often the study programs or fields we needed where already there, but with confusing names or multiple times there. At this part we really felt on the one hand the size and potential of Wikidata but also the enormous amount of curation which would be needed for this kind of knowledge database.

Often there were items which sounded perfect for our needs but it turned out to be an article. The problem with those was that there the missing descriptions brought a lot of confusion. If we have learned on thing from all of this, then that meaningful descriptions a valuable asset for any entry on wikidata.

Gathering information

Gathering information about the various study programs each university offers partially turned out to be a quite painstaking activity. Some universities made this process much easier for us than others. The University of Fiji for example did a very good job at listing their undergraduate and postgraduate degrees on separate pages and sorting them by their type.

Getting used to the Wikidata User Interface

As none of our team members have had any prior experience in working with Wikidata it took us a little while to get comfortable.

It was often the case that we added a lot of information to Wikidata but when saving the informtion got lost. This was not only frustrating but also time consuming.

Double Major

As we were adding all the various degrees that are offered in each of the universities of Fiji we came across a design problem. Many degrees offered in Fiji are double majors, meaning that they consist of two different fields of study. In order to be able to model this correctly we proposed a new property with the name "double major". We would like to use this property in a very similar way that the "academic major" property is used within the grant property.

Academic major as a blueprint for our new property

As we can see in the screenshot above, the "academic major" property / qualifier accepts a single item to be passed in. For our new property "double major" we would like to be able to pass in up to two items to indicate that the degree offered consists of two separate fields of study.

We actually found a double major which was already modelled in Wikidata: Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery (Q13948235). But this procedure to create a new item for a double major is in our opinion not the best way to handle to problem. Instead we decided to propose a new property.

Property Proposal

The Proposal for our new property "Double Major" can be found | here. We imagine a property that works like the following badly but hopefully understandable picture:

Up to this point in time we unfortunately only gathered one support for our proposal and we are not sure when this proposal we be accepted or if it will accepted at all. Apart from the one support the discussion about the new property is slowly going forward. Because there were a lot of double majors present in the universities and we didn't wanted to put them incorrectly we decided to create a table of all the double majors which we couldn't add appropriately so it is easily possible to add them in the future when hopefully a property exists which suits our needs.

Below the table with all these double majors can be found. An important detail is that there are not only double majors with two different majors like "Medicine" and "Surgery" but also double majors where the majors are the same. For example the Bachelor of Science (Double Major Chemistry). Also a bunch of cells we left empty because of clarity reasons . In this case a value can took from the first cell above where a value is given.

For getting the proposal accepted we used the disscussion page below the proposal to answer questions and convince other users of the necessity of the new proposal. Additionally we posted a topic on Pintochs Talk Page where we asked about the technical capability of Wikimedia to establish this kind of property we thought about.

List double majors

university	Degree	first part	second part	url
Fiji National University	Bachelor	Medicin	Surgey	https://programmes.fnu.ac.fj/Details.aspx?id=850
	Bachelor	Veterinary Science	Animal Husbandry	https://programmes.fnu.ac.fj/Details.aspx?id=460
	Bachelor	Library	Information Systems	https://programmes.fnu.ac.fj/Details.aspx?id=758
	Master of Commerce	Entrepeneurship	Management	https://programmes.fnu.ac.fj/Details.aspx?id=823
	Bachelor of Science	Biology	Mathmatics	https://programmes.fnu.ac.fj/Details.aspx?id=731
	Bachelor of Science	Biology	Physics	https://programmes.fnu.ac.fj/Details.aspx?id=731
	Bachelor of Science	Mathmatics	Computer Scinece	https://programmes.fnu.ac.fj/Details.aspx?id=734
	Bachelor of Science	Physics	Mathmatics	https://programmes.fnu.ac.fj/Details.aspx?id=729
	Bachelor of Science	Biology	Chemistry	https://programmes.fnu.ac.fj/Details.aspx?id=917
	Bachelor of Science	Chemistry	Mathematics	https://programmes.fnu.ac.fj/Details.aspx?id=915
	Bachelor of Science	Computer Science	Information Systems	https://programmes.fnu.ac.fj/Details.aspx?id=743
	Bachelor of Science	Chemistry	Chemistry	https://programmes.fnu.ac.fj/Details.aspx?id=755
	Bachelor of Science	Food Technlogoy	Food Technlogoy	https://programmes.fnu.ac.fj/Details.aspx?id=756
	Bachelor of Education (Secondary)	Chemistry	Biology	https://programmes.fnu.ac.fj/Details.aspx?id=501
	Bachelor of Education (Secondary)	Geography	English	https://programmes.fnu.ac.fj/Details.aspx?id=508#
	Bachelor of Education (Secondary)	English	Hindi	https://programmes.fnu.ac.fj/Details.aspx?id=507
	Bachelor of Education (Secondary)	English	History	https://programmes.fnu.ac.fj/Details.aspx?id=506
	Bachelor of Education (Secondary)	English	iTaukei	https://programmes.fnu.ac.fj/Details.aspx?id=505
	Bachelor of Education (Secondary)	Geography	History	https://programmes.fnu.ac.fj/Details.aspx?id=500
	Bachelor of Education (Secondary)	Mathematics	Computer Science	https://programmes.fnu.ac.fj/Details.aspx?id=503
	Bachelor of Education (Secondary)	Mathematics	Information Systems	https://programmes.fnu.ac.fj/Details.aspx?id=504
	Bachelor of Education (Secondary)	Mathematics	Physics	https://programmes.fnu.ac.fj/Details.aspx?id=502
	Bachelor of Education (Secondary)	Physical Education	Art and Craft	https://programmes.fnu.ac.fj/Details.aspx?id=512
	Bachelor of Education (Secondary)	Physical Education	Music	https://programmes.fnu.ac.fj/Details.aspx?id=511
	Bachelor of Education (Secondary)	Physics	Computer Science	https://programmes.fnu.ac.fj/Details.aspx?id=499
	Bachelor of Education (Secondary)	Physics	Information Systems	https://programmes.fnu.ac.fj/Details.aspx?id=498
	Bachelor of Commerce	Accounting	Banking	https://programmes.fnu.ac.fj/CBHTS.aspx
	Bachelor of Commerce		Economics
	Bachelor of Commerce		Finance
	Bachelor of Commerce		Information Systems
	Bachelor of Commerce		Law
	Bachelor of Commerce		Management
	Bachelor of Commerce		Marketing
	Bachelor of Commerce		Industrial relations and Human Resources
	Bachelor of Commerce	Banking	Economics
	Bachelor of Commerce		Finance
	Bachelor of Commerce		Information Systems
	Bachelor of Commerce		Law
	Bachelor of Commerce		Management
	Bachelor of Commerce		Marketing
	Bachelor of Commerce		Industrial relations and Human Resources
	Bachelor of Commerce	Economics	Finance
	Bachelor of Commerce		Information Systems
	Bachelor of Commerce		Law
	Bachelor of Commerce		Management
	Bachelor of Commerce		Industrial relations and Human Resources
	Bachelor of Commerce	Finance	Industrial relations and Human Resources
	Bachelor of Commerce		Law
	Bachelor of Commerce		Information Systems
	Bachelor of Commerce		Management
	Bachelor of Commerce		Marketing
	Bachelor of Commerce	Industrial relations and Human Resources	Information Systems
	Bachelor of Commerce		Law
	Bachelor of Commerce	Law	Management
	Bachelor of Commerce		Marketing
	Bachelor of Commerce	Management	Information Systems
	Bachelor of Commerce		Industrial relations and Human Resources
	Bachelor of Commerce		Marketing
	Bachelor of Commerce	Marketing	Information Systems
	Bachelor of Commerce		Industrial relations and Human Resources
	Bachelor of Commerce		Economics
university of Fiji	Bachelor of Commerce	Accounting	Accounting	http://www.unifiji.ac.fj/bachelor-of-commerce-in-accounting-double-major/
	Bachelor of Science	Biology	Biology	http://www.unifiji.ac.fj/bachelor-of-science-in-biology-double-major/
	Bachelor of Science	Chemistry	Chemistry	http://www.unifiji.ac.fj/chemistry/
	Bachelor of Commerce	Economics	Economics	http://www.unifiji.ac.fj/bachelor-of-commerce-in-economics-double-major/
	Bachelor of Arts	Hindi Language	Indian Culture	http://www.unifiji.ac.fj/bachelor-of-arts-in-hindi-language-and-indian-culture-double-major/
	Diploma	Hindi Language	Indian Culture	http://www.unifiji.ac.fj/diploma-in-hindi-language-and-indian-culture/
	Bachelor of Science	Information Technology	Information Technology	http://www.unifiji.ac.fj/bachelor-of-science-in-information-technology-double-major/-
	Bachelor of Arts	iTaukei Language	Culture	http://www.unifiji.ac.fj/bachelor-of-arts-in-itaukei-language-and-culture-double-major/
	Diploma	iTaukei Language	Culture	http://www.unifiji.ac.fj/diploma-in-itaukei-language-and-culture/
	Bachelor of Arts	Language	Culture	http://www.unifiji.ac.fj/bachelor-of-arts-in-language-and-literature-double-major/
	Bachelor of Commerce	Management	Manegement	http://www.unifiji.ac.fj/bachelor-of-commerce-in-management-double-major/
	Bachelor of Science	Physics	Physics	http://www.unifiji.ac.fj/bachelor-of-science-in-physics-double-major/
	Bachelor	Medicine	Surgery	http://www.unifiji.ac.fj/bachelor-of-medicine-and-bachelor-of-surgery-mbbs/