Wikidata:WikiProject University degrees/Reports/Malta

Malta (Q233), Summer term 2018

Exploring the data of anabin

We decided to retrieve the degree programs of the University of Malta. The search of institutions which are universities provided a list of 4 entries which all belong to the only University of Malta. The first entry is a link from the old name to the actual dataset. The second entry is an institute of the Maltese university. The third entry uses the Maltese name and is the actual root dataset. The fourth entry links the English name to the previous one. Since there is just one University of Malta, the search for degree programs in Malta provides all programs of it. But there is an exception - we know that the International Maritime Law Institute belongs to the University of Malta. But all programs of this institute do not belong to it. So should we handle this institute as an own university?

Exploring the data of Wikidata

Wikidata has a page for the University of Malta, but there are no links to any degree programs, which are offered. Also, there is an alias for the English name, which is actually the Maltese one. So we should add the Maltese name for the university.

"The Dear Leader’s secret stay in Malta"

We created a query to get all persons who studied there and got Kim Jong-il as the first entry.

The following query uses these:

• Items: University of Malta (Q426045)   

• Properties: educated at (P69)   

  SELECT ?Alumni ?AlumniLabel 
  WHERE {
    ?Alumni wdt:P69 wd:Q426045    # Alumni of the University of Malta
    SERVICE wikibase:label { bd:serviceParam wikibase:language "en". }
  }
  

Try it!

You can review the Wikidata Page of Kim Jong-il, to see the matching. A bit of googling revealed, that this is actually true. There is an article in the Times of Malta, with this story, and also Wikipedia as another source of this.

“But in the 1970s, Mr Kim was in Malta to learn English, possibly as part of an exchange that included a secret agreement between the Labour government and the North Korean regime for the provision of military training and weapons.”

"MBA vs. EMBA"

It seems there is a difference between an Master of Business Administration and Executive Master of Business Administration. Anabin.kmk.org provides the following information for its Master of Business degree program. The university of Malta also describes the degree program in the same why. With a slightly difference in the Postnominal description as Executive M.B.A. (Melit.). Since this is already a difference we compared it with another university. Therefore we chose the Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien (WU) Executive Academy. The WU calls its degree Master of Business Administration. When searching on wikidata for Executive Master of Business Administration we got two results the regular Master of Business Administration and the EMBA, which we already renamed correctly to Executive - Master of Business Administration. The result contains the regular Master of Business Administration. Within the regular Master of Business Administration, we found in the French row in Also known as the term Executive MBA. Regarding various findings about the difference between a regular MBA and the EMBA (e.g. at mastersportal.com), we assume it is necessary to have two separate entries in wikidata to describe this programs. Therefore we removed the entry Executive MBA in Master of Business Administration from the “also known as” column.

Academic discipline vs. Academic major

Wikidata already had a bunch of academic disciplines, which are also all academic majors. But there were just 34 classifications as such. So we run a query to get all academic disciplines.

The following query uses these:

• Items: academic discipline (Q11862829)   

• Properties: instance of (P31)   , subclass of (P279)   

  SELECT ?instance_of ?subclass_of 
  WHERE {
    {?instance_of wdt:P31 wd:Q11862829. } UNION
    {?subclass_of wdt:P279 wd:Q11862829.}
    SERVICE wikibase:label { bd:serviceParam wikibase:language "[AUTO_LANGUAGE],en". }
  }
  

Try it!

After that, we used QuickStatements to automatically add the statement, that all these disciplines are also academic majors. This were 890 statements and it was finished around 5 Minutes. Apart from that, we found that the Social work did not have the academic discipline in the first place, so we did not manage to automatically catch this to add the property of academic major. So we still needed to check by hand.

Preparing the data

We downloaded the degree program information from anabin by fetching the json response from the server. After converting the json into csv format we were throwing away all information we did not need to import. We went through all degree programs and corrected and enriched all academic degrees and academic majors/disciplines while keeping track of the Q-IDs in the csv. Sometimes we needed to entirely add new entities for academic majors. Because of this time consuming manual work, we did not manage to clean up and import all the degree programs of the University of Malta.

Importing the data

We already imported the statements for all academic disciplines, that they are also academic majors. After that, we had all set to actually import the degree programs to the entity of the University of Malta. Again, we used QuickStatements but needed to split our data. There are programs like the MBA which has no academic major, so the qualifier is not applicable, so we made 2 batches.

Issues

We had problems with the constraints of the degree programs. For each degree, there is a students count required. We found it too unrealistic o provide such a number, since this can change. Additionally, we would need to count the students by ourselves, since the student count in only provided in a PDF file for each major. Also, the start and end date did not really make sense to us. Another issue we had, was adding references for each academic major. The import worked fine, but in the visualisation, it is not possible to map references for qualifiers. This way, the academic degree Master of Arts has 19 References, which all link to detail pages of the 19 academic majors.

Result

After doing the clean up for all academic disciplines/majors and some academic degrees, we managed to actually link some degree programs to the Wikidata page of the University of Malta and enrich it with data which were missing.

The following query uses these:

• Items: University of Malta (Q426045)   

• Properties: grants (P5460)   , academic major (P812)   

  SELECT ?degreeLabel ?majorLabel 
  WHERE {
    
    wd:Q426045 p:P5460 ?statement . # University of Malta
    ?statement ps:P5460 ?degree .
    OPTIONAL {
  		?statement pq:P812 ?major . FILTER  bound(?major)
  		}
    SERVICE wikibase:label { bd:serviceParam wikibase:language "[AUTO_LANGUAGE],en". }
  }
  ORDER BY ?degreeLabel
  

Try it!

References